You shouldn't teach children about road safety until they're old enough to drive
You don't teach children how to drive a car until they are old enough to drive ie 17 certainly
Utter nonsense
My father had me driving his car on a disused airfield when I was 13 and he taught me well as I actually passed my test on my 17th birthday, celebrating it by a high speed run from Berwick to the Scottish border (90 mph +)
Yes so you had no training on driving on a public highway before 17 then, I am also shocked you broke the speed limit so flagrantly BigG. I thought you were a law abiding citizen!
The secret is not to get caught and yes I passed my test on my 17th birthday in 1961
No, the secret and the law is to respect other road users by keeping to the speed limit
I respected the road users as at the time I was the only vehicle on the road and it is a long straight road
Maybe also because it was Jim Clark country who my father knew quite well
You really are at times very strange
But what if you had hit a sheep trying to cross? You may have had free lamp chops for a week but it wouldn't have been great news for the farmer who owned it nor obviously the sheep itself
The road was walled, clear and just the kind of thing one does when youthful
You are quite the most ridiculous far right evangelical so called Christian who frankly belongs in a different age and certainly is not an advert for Christ's teaching
So you still weren't thinking about the poor sheep then!
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
It may seem that way to you, but the people who have gone out and seen what actually happens disagree.
From a UNESCO review of the available literature;
The paper concludes that sex education programmes that are based on a comprehensive curriculum can delay the onset of sexual activity among adolescents and young people, reduce the frequency of intercourse, reduce the frequency of unprotected sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Furthermore, sex education programmes do not increase sexual activity among adolescents and young people and generally result in increased knowledge about human sexuality.
As to why... one of the things that adolescents like is discovery and breaking taboos. It's why they are both profoundly annoying and surprisingly life-enhancing to teach. If adults aren't talking about sex, it increases the taboo factor which increases the thrill.
It's what Scandinavians have got right. Talk about sex as a thing that happens in various forms. Domesticate it, so to speak. Seems to work in practice.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
It's a really, really bad idea for kids to get their first sex education from YouPorn.
Because that is what's going to happen if we follow @HYUFD's suggestions.
(Also: has anyone else seen Euphoria. Man that's disturbing.)
I suggested sex education from 11 not never. Children shouldn't be watching YouPorn before 11 either and ideally not before 16 and only irresponsible parents would allow their children to watch pornography so young
At what age did you start watching it?
Indeed, he seems to know a lot more about YouPorn than I do. I've never even heard of it.
They specialise in educational videos about close knit families.
Oh no, not a video equivalent of the comedian community's "Aristocrats" joke?
Got it in one.
HYUFD always feels like he'd be more at home with rednecks than in the UK.
A redneck came home and said to his father "Dad, I met the most INCREDIBLE girl in the world today. She's smart, she's beautiful, AND she's funny."
Dad pats his son on the back and walks him into the kitchen, "That's great, son. I'm proud of you for finding someone you like so much."
"That's not the best part, Dad. She's a VIRGIN."
At this point the father slams his hand down on the counter, "I forbid this relationship, son. I never want you to see this girl again. And if I find out you do, I'm going to give you the biggest whooping you ever had."
Tears stream down the son's face, "But, Dad, WHY? She's amazing and she likes me!"
"Well, son. If she ain't good enough for her own family, she ain't good enough for ours."
It says all about 21st century Britain that support for traditional Christian morality makes you an American redneck apparently
Yes, 21st Century Britons have moved on from the past, you and rednecks have not.
"Traditional Christian morality" until a few decades ago was for young couple to hook up, accidentally get pregnant, then have a sudden wedding a few months before their first child was born.
Thank goodness we've moved on from that nonsense.
When we had more Christian morality we had fewer divorces and a birth rate below replacement level and less of a housing problem as we didn't have as many single adults to house
More unhappy marriages, especially marriages were men felt free to abuse their wives, was not better.
Most divorces do not happen because of abuse now, they happen because of 'personal differences' or affairs
Yes and 'personal differences' or affairs happened in the past too.
Now people have a way out rather than being trapped in a marriage with personal differences or affairs. Thank goodness.
Or they could work through personal differences and keep the family together
Likewise, I find stories like Hopkins being disparaging about his roles in Thor to be rather snobbish of certain actors. I mean, good on him and others for getting paid for parts and roles they think little of, or productions they don't think are of great artistic merit (especially in these greenscreen heavy times), no harm in getting paid, but if you're rich enough already and you think it's beneath you why even bother?
At least he still puts in a bare minimum of effort when he's in something he doesn't give a shit about, which some actors don't.
To my mind some of the greatest acting ever must have been in the modern Planet of the Apes. Not just because Andy Serkis is a tremendous actor, but because of the people acting opposite the man in a suit covered in ping pong balls acting like a monkey right in front of them.
Personally I only think Norse Gods should be allowed to play Norse Gods on screen.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
It's almost as if gay men were not adequately represented in the acting world.
Is Roaster Ross going to get outraged by pantomimes?
His argument seems to be pantomime dames don't push gender ideology
I don't think Drag Queen Story Hour does either. This is just Moray copying US nonsense.
'Encouraging children to develop a love of reading through imaginative story time, while promoting inclusion, diversity and acceptance...' Now nobody wants intolerance but 6 and under is rather young to be discussing Trans
We teach kinds younger than that that there are different sexes. Is that wrong too?
Well there are, that is a biological fact
And there are transgender people. That is a sociological fact.
Only through surgery and even with that and hormones treatment trans cyclists are no longer allowed to compete in female races as even with hormone suppression they still have an advantage over female cyclists https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/65718748
No, transgender people are transgender even without undergoing surgery.
Maybe if you'd been taught this stuff at a younger age you'd be a little more clued in to the facts.
So you want to teach 6 year olds they are transgender? No wonder you on the left are out of touch!
You're confusing being taught that you are something, with being taught about other people. No wonder the Tories are out of touch with humanity.
It is not appropriate for 6 year olds or even older primary school children. It should be a secondary school issue only
Bollocks.
I literally head the same arguments made about not exposing kids to gay ideology when Section 28 was a thing.
My then 4 year old only had one question about attending a same sex wedding.
'Which one of you throws the bouquet, and can you make sure my dad catches it?'
I have a 5 year old and it's not appropriate to discuss sexual intercourse at that age.
Your five year old presumably knows that there are men and women. They don't need to hear about intercourse to have an understanding of that fact. They don't need to know about penetration to understand that some couples are different genders and some couples are the same gender. They don't need to know what adults do with their genitals to know that sometimes people are born as one gender but prefer to live as another.
You don't need to deliver all the yucky truth about everything all at once.
Personally I wouldn't allow any sex education or discussion of gender identity in schools until pupils are 11 or over and have reached puberty
Wait until kids have hit puberty before discussing puberty?
Talk about waiting until the horse has bolted before closing the door.
Unless you are a paedophile kids shoudn't be engaging in or discussing sex until they have reached puberty absolutely
If you want to protect children from paedophiles you need to teach them well before puberty how to be alert to the sorts of behaviour which indicate someone who may want to harm them. One of those indicators may well be people seeking to sexualise a child or encourage them to behave in an inappropriately sexual way or to densitise them to adults doing so in front of a child.
On drag, there are drag acts which are harmless fun - like pantomime dames etc.., But there are some which are very sexualised and simply not appropriate for children. So it depends which ones we are talking about. Saying that all drag acts should be banned is as daft as saying that all are appropriate for children. Some are; some aren't.
I would also hope that any group - drag or no - wishing to get close to children are properly and thoroughly checked out first. I recently listened to the documentary "In Dark Corners" on iPlayer Sounds about prolific paedophile teachers in some well-known public schools and how they targeted vulnerable children and moved from school to school. It is a horrific story and we'd be naive in thinking it is not still happening. Safeguarding is simply not taken seriously enough in practice. Child abusers will do whatever it takes to get close to children in order to abuse them and behave like parasites on more respectable institutions, groups and movements in order to achieve their aims. We would do well to remember that and not dismiss such concerns as moral panics, as the IICSA final report (and earlier ones) clearly state.
An IICSA final report which is being proudly swept under a bulging carpet by the Party of @HYUFD.
To be honest, none of the parties have taken the IICSA reports seriously. None.
You shouldn't teach children about road safety until they're old enough to drive
You don't teach children how to drive a car until they are old enough to drive ie 17 certainly
But you do teach them about the existence of cars and road safety.
Honestly, sometimes you say things which would disgrace a gormless nitwit.
I am Chair of Trustees of a girls' primary school and we have very good age appropriate PHSE education and very strong safeguarding policies. And with my own children, they learnt a little about babies when their younger brother and sister were born and, as they asked questions as they grew older. It needs to be age appropriate. But the idea that you keep them in ignorance until puberty is utterly daft.
No it isn't, they should not be learning about sex at primary school
They will learn it in the playground and far better being taught in a sensible way by the school and yes, primary schools, not least as many of the females will be starting puberty and need guidance
@HYUFD's ignorance on this is limitless. For one thing he seems to think that age appropriate sex education is teaching children how to do sex.
More worryingly, keeping children ignorant as he wants to do will make them more vulnerable - not less - to abusers. Attitudes like his are not just daft. But dangerous.
It is not 'ignorance' to ignore you kowtowing to the liberal consensus on this. Tough
If you want to teach under 10s in detail about sex and gender identity fine, I don't!
You certainly need to be taught reading comprehension. Nowhere in what I have written have I said what you write in your second sentence. Nor do I or the school kowtow to any sort of liberal consensus - not that you understand what liberalism means.
We do take seriously the need to give our girls a thoughtful rounded education and the critical faculties and confidence to recognise ignorant bullshit when they encounter it.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
I saw a series of those programmes recently, and they were weirdly compelling, mostly to spot the tropes and formulas that became apparent very quickly. Like the one guy who is the 'skeptic' whose job is to go 'Well, I don't know it could have been [insert normal explanation], but it is weird', to 'experts' who are entirely self proclaimed without even an irrelevant PhD or job as the caterer at the FBI to lend authority.
All narrated by someone who also does serious documentaries (or sounds like someone who does)
I don't think we've beaten Paul Merton's description of Erich von Daniken as being the chap where the answer was always No to his quesitons.
"Could this be a 14th century flying saucer?" "No" "Were the Aztecs the first astronauts?" "No"
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
Grifters grifting is the logical explanation, just as it is was with the lab leak. Cui bono explains both.
Dismissing grifters grifting as imbecilic is as foolish as dismissing them doing so with regards to lab leak as imbecilic.
Is there much evidence for the view that teenagers who give birth when they're aged over 16y9m wouldn't have got pregnant if they'd had more sex education?
Likewise, I find stories like Hopkins being disparaging about his roles in Thor to be rather snobbish of certain actors. I mean, good on him and others for getting paid for parts and roles they think little of, or productions they don't think are of great artistic merit (especially in these greenscreen heavy times), no harm in getting paid, but if you're rich enough already and you think it's beneath you why even bother?
At least he still puts in a bare minimum of effort when he's in something he doesn't give a shit about, which some actors don't.
To my mind some of the greatest acting ever must have been in the modern Planet of the Apes. Not just because Andy Serkis is a tremendous actor, but because of the people acting opposite the man in a suit covered in ping pong balls acting like a monkey right in front of them.
Personally I only think Norse Gods should be allowed to play Norse Gods on screen.
And where there's a death scene in a film... well...
Likewise, I find stories like Hopkins being disparaging about his roles in Thor to be rather snobbish of certain actors. I mean, good on him and others for getting paid for parts and roles they think little of, or productions they don't think are of great artistic merit (especially in these greenscreen heavy times), no harm in getting paid, but if you're rich enough already and you think it's beneath you why even bother?
At least he still puts in a bare minimum of effort when he's in something he doesn't give a shit about, which some actors don't.
To my mind some of the greatest acting ever must have been in the modern Planet of the Apes. Not just because Andy Serkis is a tremendous actor, but because of the people acting opposite the man in a suit covered in ping pong balls acting like a monkey right in front of them.
Personally I only think Norse Gods should be allowed to play Norse Gods on screen.
Well, some people did moan about Idris Elba playing Heimdall (though as ever it's hard to tell just how prevalent such complaints really were), but it's ok because it was a version where they were all aliens anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Likewise, I find stories like Hopkins being disparaging about his roles in Thor to be rather snobbish of certain actors. I mean, good on him and others for getting paid for parts and roles they think little of, or productions they don't think are of great artistic merit (especially in these greenscreen heavy times), no harm in getting paid, but if you're rich enough already and you think it's beneath you why even bother?
At least he still puts in a bare minimum of effort when he's in something he doesn't give a shit about, which some actors don't.
To my mind some of the greatest acting ever must have been in the modern Planet of the Apes. Not just because Andy Serkis is a tremendous actor, but because of the people acting opposite the man in a suit covered in ping pong balls acting like a monkey right in front of them.
Personally I only think Norse Gods should be allowed to play Norse Gods on screen.
And where there's a death scene in a film... well...
If only Vampires played Vampires, we wouldn't have had to suffer through Twilight.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
I don't particularly want to join in the pile on on @HYUFD, but would like to point out that while "Don't talk to Strangers" is reasonable advice to young children, it is woefully inadequate as a substitute for sex education.
Very little sex abuse of children is from random strangers. Most of it is within families and step-families*, or via trusted "friends" of families, or authority figures like priests, sports coaches etc. Children need to be taught about body privacy and not to keep secrets about things they are not comfortable with.
*I appreciate the jokes about Step-moms on porn sites are meant as humour, but the ubiquity of this as a porn genre does say something about how incest and para-incest is seen by many men.
The apparent ubiquity of para-incest themes in pornography is something I really want to see proper scientific studies on. Is there a genuine mass market for this material, is it seen as a harmless taboo-bothering joke, or are users kind of put off by it?
It certainly seems odd to me. In some ways a thin plot justification to put two purportedly unrelated people in minimal clothing in the same house.
I think more than that though, in that there are some men who cannot be in the same house as women, and not feel they should penetrate them. I fear for their real step-daughters and step-sisters etc, and there are many families where step-relatives share a house, often unsupervised.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
I knew this was a documentary (Sadly, looking at the wikipedia, it's not actually about a wartime black Gestapo officer, for shame. I have seen a video review of The Black Six though, that's just a biker movie).
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
No I didn’t. I said I think that it’s perfectly possible to be a natural cause. I still think that.
I’ve been following UFO and other Fortean stuff all my life. This is just another flap. There is no evidence. Go back to the dawn of radar. Plenty of weird stuff seen. Radar gets better, less weird stuff. Arguably each new technology or iteration leads to new flaps of stuff, just like the current fluff about balloons. Because detectors can suddenly start to see them, doesn't make them new or turn them into alien craft.
I would be the happiest person on PB if it turned out to be aliens. I think it would be an epochal event.
I just don’t think the bullshit being pushed is it.
Is Roaster Ross going to get outraged by pantomimes?
His argument seems to be pantomime dames don't push gender ideology
I don't think Drag Queen Story Hour does either. This is just Moray copying US nonsense.
'Encouraging children to develop a love of reading through imaginative story time, while promoting inclusion, diversity and acceptance...' Now nobody wants intolerance but 6 and under is rather young to be discussing Trans
We teach kinds younger than that that there are different sexes. Is that wrong too?
Well there are, that is a biological fact
And there are transgender people. That is a sociological fact.
Only through surgery and even with that and hormones treatment trans cyclists are no longer allowed to compete in female races as even with hormone suppression they still have an advantage over female cyclists https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/65718748
No, transgender people are transgender even without undergoing surgery.
Maybe if you'd been taught this stuff at a younger age you'd be a little more clued in to the facts.
So you want to teach 6 year olds they are transgender? No wonder you on the left are out of touch!
You're confusing being taught that you are something, with being taught about other people. No wonder the Tories are out of touch with humanity.
It is not appropriate for 6 year olds or even older primary school children. It should be a secondary school issue only
Bollocks.
I literally head the same arguments made about not exposing kids to gay ideology when Section 28 was a thing.
My then 4 year old only had one question about attending a same sex wedding.
'Which one of you throws the bouquet, and can you make sure my dad catches it?'
I have a 5 year old and it's not appropriate to discuss sexual intercourse at that age.
Your five year old presumably knows that there are men and women. They don't need to hear about intercourse to have an understanding of that fact. They don't need to know about penetration to understand that some couples are different genders and some couples are the same gender. They don't need to know what adults do with their genitals to know that sometimes people are born as one gender but prefer to live as another.
You don't need to deliver all the yucky truth about everything all at once.
Personally I wouldn't allow any sex education or discussion of gender identity in schools until pupils are 11 or over and have reached puberty
Wait until kids have hit puberty before discussing puberty?
Talk about waiting until the horse has bolted before closing the door.
Unless you are a paedophile kids shoudn't be engaging in or discussing sex until they have reached puberty absolutely
If you want to protect children from paedophiles you need to teach them well before puberty how to be alert to the sorts of behaviour which indicate someone who may want to harm them. One of those indicators may well be people seeking to sexualise a child or encourage them to behave in an inappropriately sexual way or to densitise them to adults doing so in front of a child.
On drag, there are drag acts which are harmless fun - like pantomime dames etc.., But there are some which are very sexualised and simply not appropriate for children. So it depends which ones we are talking about. Saying that all drag acts should be banned is as daft as saying that all are appropriate for children. Some are; some aren't.
I would also hope that any group - drag or no - wishing to get close to children are properly and thoroughly checked out first. I recently listened to the documentary "In Dark Corners" on iPlayer Sounds about prolific paedophile teachers in some well-known public schools and how they targeted vulnerable children and moved from school to school. It is a horrific story and we'd be naive in thinking it is not still happening. Safeguarding is simply not taken seriously enough in practice. Child abusers will do whatever it takes to get close to children in order to abuse them and behave like parasites on more respectable institutions, groups and movements in order to achieve their aims. We would do well to remember that and not dismiss such concerns as moral panics, as the IICSA final report (and earlier ones) clearly state.
An IICSA final report which is being proudly swept under a bulging carpet by the Party of @HYUFD.
To be honest, none of the parties have taken the IICSA reports seriously. None.
You shouldn't teach children about road safety until they're old enough to drive
You don't teach children how to drive a car until they are old enough to drive ie 17 certainly
But you do teach them about the existence of cars and road safety.
Honestly, sometimes you say things which would disgrace a gormless nitwit.
I am Chair of Trustees of a girls' primary school and we have very good age appropriate PHSE education and very strong safeguarding policies. And with my own children, they learnt a little about babies when their younger brother and sister were born and, as they asked questions as they grew older. It needs to be age appropriate. But the idea that you keep them in ignorance until puberty is utterly daft.
No it isn't, they should not be learning about sex at primary school
They will learn it in the playground and far better being taught in a sensible way by the school and yes, primary schools, not least as many of the females will be starting puberty and need guidance
@HYUFD's ignorance on this is limitless. For one thing he seems to think that age appropriate sex education is teaching children how to do sex.
More worryingly, keeping children ignorant as he wants to do will make them more vulnerable - not less - to abusers. Attitudes like his are not just daft. But dangerous.
It is not 'ignorance' to ignore you kowtowing to the liberal consensus on this. Tough
If you want to teach under 10s in detail about sex and gender identity fine, I don't!
You certainly need to be taught reading comprehension. Nowhere in what I have written have I said what you write in your second sentence. Nor do I or the school kowtow to any sort of liberal consensus - not that you understand what liberalism means.
We do take seriously the need to give our girls a thoughtful rounded education and the critical faculties and confidence to recognise ignorant bullshit when they encounter it.
Yes you do, you kowtow to the socially liberal consensus and you know it
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
No I didn’t. I said I think that it’s perfectly possible to be a natural cause. I still think that.
I’ve been following UFO and other Fortean stuff all my life. This is just another flap. There is no evidence. Go back to the dawn of radar. Plenty of weird stuff seen. Radar gets better, less weird stuff. Arguably each new technology or iteration leads to new flaps of stuff, just like the current fluff about balloons. Because detectors can suddenly start to see them, doesn't make them new or turn them into alien craft.
I would be the happiest person on PB if it turned out to be aliens. I think it would be an epochal event.
I just don’t think the bullshit being pushed is it.
Yes, being underwhelmed by breathless reactions to some of this stuff doesn't mean people simply don't want to accept the idea - on the contrary some would like it to be so!
I do worry about first contact though, since no matter what it might involve at some point some human somehwere will want to have sex with the visitor, and that might offend them.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
"Over the last 18 years there has been significant progress on teenage pregnancy. The under-18 conception rate has fallen by 62% and the under-16 conception rate by over 65%. Both are now at the lowest level since 1969"
"The international evidence for reducing teenage pregnancy is clear 1,2,3. Building the knowledge, skills, resilience and aspirations of young people and providing easy access to welcoming services, helps them to delay sex until they are ready to enjoy healthy, consensual relationships and to use contraception to prevent unplanned pregnancy. An open culture and ease of parental communication around sexual issues are also associated with lower teenage pregnancy rates"
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
Mobile phones...a big factor in the drop in teenage smoking too.
There was a pretty good idea of both contraception and sex education when I was a young teenager, and a lot of sexual activity. The culture in the Eighties was much more promiscuous than now.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
I supose my problem with this is that one would expect that, having had high quality cameras being carried by practially every single person in the Western world and the majority in the whole world for the last 10-15 years, we would have seen a massive upsurge by many orders of magnitude in the number of recorded, photographed sitings of alien craft compared to, say, 30 years ago. And yet we do not. We get the same rare blurry images from the public and a few debatable images from the military or from civilain aviation but that explosion of confirmable sitings just hasn't happened.
So unless the aliens suddeny decided to bugger off just at the moment we were developing the ability for teh man in the treet to record them, I think it is just so much hokum.
I am not in any way intellectualy opposed to the idea of aliens. The idea that there are not millions of civilisations out there seems inconceivable to me. The idea they are managing to float around Earth with exactly the same degree of secrecy as they did 30 or 50 years ago seems.. unlikely.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
And we get back to house prices and home ownership......
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
'Life' is going on. Trying to infer from the broadest national stats, benefits from a specific educational change or set of changes is silly, as I am sure Ben knows.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
Look at the chart on page 14 of this. The teenage pregnancy rate had already fallen by a third by 2011.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
And we get back to house prices and home ownership......
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
Is there much evidence for the view that teenagers who give birth when they're aged over 16y9m wouldn't have got pregnant if they'd had more sex education?
Yes
The proportion of conceptions that are followed by abortions is rising though. It's been increasing for all age groups since 2015. What happens to the education? Sounds a bit like Cinderella's coach. Anyway the state should stay TF out of discouraging people who are over the age of consent from making babies. That just shouldn't be a policy aim. "Our bodies are our own". (And Malthus can do one.)
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
Look at the chart on page 14 of this. The teenage pregnancy rate had already fallen by a third by 2011.
As I said further evidence of the ever increasing age of UK first time mothers, now well over 30 and our birth rate well below replacement level. We could probably now do with a few more late teen pregnancies and mothers not even less
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
Casting for the Tiger Woods biopic will be interesting. Good luck finding the 1/4 Thai 1/4 Chinese 1/4 Caucausian, 1/8 African American, 1/8 Native American actors for the auditions.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
Yes, while obviously there are exceptions, over all youths are more sober and serious than previous generations. Particularly so for the university educated, even if that seriousness manifests in "woke" causes.
With the exception of knife crime between young black men, there has been quite a drop off in casual violence too.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
Look at the chart on page 14 of this. The teenage pregnancy rate had already fallen by a third by 2011.
As I said further evidence of the ever increasing age of UK first time mothers, now well over 30 and our birth rate well below replacement level. We could probably now do with a few more late teen pregnancies and mothers not even less
Right, we need Boris back from wherever he is on holiday, double quick.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
Leon's already told us this one I think - young people are boring, their sperm counts are low, and they're puritannical.
All might be true, but it's not really an explanation even if it is. High costs prohibit certain vices from spreading so much, which then means the next youngest also don't get into it, and the superfast spread of cultural norms online helps enforce monotonous acceptance of prevailing orthodoxy (or pushing into acceptable sub-niches) without needing other rebellious behaviour like drinking and drugs?
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
I supose my problem with this is that one would expect that, having had high quality cameras being carried by practially every single person in the Western world and the majority in the whole world for the last 10-15 years, we would have seen a massive upsurge by many orders of magnitude in the number of recorded, photographed sitings of alien craft compared to, say, 30 years ago. And yet we do not. We get the same rare blurry images from the public and a few debatable images from the military or from civilain aviation but that explosion of confirmable sitings just hasn't happened.
So unless the aliens suddeny decided to bugger off just at the moment we were developing the ability for teh man in the treet to record them, I think it is just so much hokum.
I am not in any way intellectualy opposed to the idea of aliens. The idea that there are not millions of civilisations out there seems inconceivable to me. The idea they are managing to float around Earth with exactly the same degree of secrecy as they did 30 or 50 years ago seems.. unlikely.
I agree. The lack of multiple photos from excellent phone cameras is a major pointer AGAINST “option 3”
But then we are left with option 2: the USG is contriving some massive psyops…. But there are serious problems with that, too
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
Try this. Vices are acquired as a social tool - a ritual to enter a group, social lubrication, a means to overcome social inhibition. As people spend more time socialising online and/or with people with pre-selected common characteristics, the need to acquire a vice is much reduced.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
Was there so much less sex education in 2011? I doubt it. More a further reflection of the decline of motherhood and the family with those who do have children increasingly waiting until well into their 30s or their early 40s
Look at the chart on page 14 of this. The teenage pregnancy rate had already fallen by a third by 2011.
As I said further evidence of the ever increasing age of UK first time mothers, now well over 30 and our birth rate well below replacement level. We could probably now do with a few more late teen pregnancies and mothers not even less
Right, we need Boris back from wherever he is on holiday, double quick.
Well nobody can say Boris hasn't done his bit to help turn around our declining birthrate
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
'Life' is going on. Trying to infer from the broadest national stats, benefits from a specific educational change or set of changes is silly, as I am sure Ben knows.
Yes, there are limits to what can be concluded from broad national stats. However, the evidence in this case is much broader than that, from multiple countries and using various research designs.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
Plenty of actors (Michael Caine, for instance) had great careers doing just that.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
'Life' is going on. Trying to infer from the broadest national stats, benefits from a specific educational change or set of changes is silly, as I am sure Ben knows.
It doesn't suit your argument, so you ignore it? There was a 62% drop in teenage pregnancies between 1998 and 2018.
It's not just about Sex and Relationship Education of course but that is a key component.
This is actually a cross-party government success, instigated under Labour, continued under the Conservative/LD coalition and the succeeding Conservative governments.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
Social Media Photos/Rebelling against previous generations/Prices/Fitness/Religion in that order.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
I saw a series of those programmes recently, and they were weirdly compelling, mostly to spot the tropes and formulas that became apparent very quickly. Like the one guy who is the 'skeptic' whose job is to go 'Well, I don't know it could have been [insert normal explanation], but it is weird', to 'experts' who are entirely self proclaimed without even an irrelevant PhD or job as the caterer at the FBI to lend authority.
All narrated by someone who also does serious documentaries (or sounds like someone who does)
I don't think we've beaten Paul Merton's description of Erich von Daniken as being the chap where the answer was always No to his quesitons.
"Could this be a 14th century flying saucer?" "No" "Were the Aztecs the first astronauts?" "No"
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
I saw a series of those programmes recently, and they were weirdly compelling, mostly to spot the tropes and formulas that became apparent very quickly. Like the one guy who is the 'skeptic' whose job is to go 'Well, I don't know it could have been [insert normal explanation], but it is weird', to 'experts' who are entirely self proclaimed without even an irrelevant PhD or job as the caterer at the FBI to lend authority.
All narrated by someone who also does serious documentaries (or sounds like someone who does)
I don't think we've beaten Paul Merton's description of Erich von Daniken as being the chap where the answer was always No to his quesitons.
"Could this be a 14th century flying saucer?" "No" "Were the Aztecs the first astronauts?" "No"
At the age of 19, he was given a four-month suspended sentence for theft.[6] He left the school and was apprenticed to a Swiss hotelier for a time,[7] before moving to Egypt. In December 1964, von Däniken wrote Hatten unsere Vorfahren Besuch aus dem Weltraum? ("Were Our Ancestors Visited from Space?") for the German-Canadian periodical Der Nordwesten.[8] While in Egypt, he was involved in a jewelry deal which resulted in a nine-month conviction for fraud and embezzlement upon his return to Switzerland.[6]
Following his release, von Däniken became a manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos, Switzerland, during which time he wrote Chariots of the Gods? (German: Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, literally "Memories of the Future"), working on the manuscript late at night after the hotel's guests had retired.[9] The draft of the book was turned down by several publishers. Econ Verlag (now part of Ullstein Verlag) was willing to publish the book after a complete reworking by a professional author, Utz Utermann, who used the pseudonym of Wilhelm Roggersdorf. Utermann was a former editor of the Nazi Party's newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and had been a Nazi bestselling author.[10] The re-write of Chariots of the Gods? was accepted for publication early in 1967, but not printed until March 1968.[9]
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
Plenty of actors (Michael Caine, for instance) had great careers doing just that.
Indeed, many major stars have never actually been very versatile. Possibly most are rather limited in their range, at least as far as those casting even let them show range.
It's like how there's been a bit more joking in the last few years about The Rock being one of the highest paid actors in the world despite not being a good actor. Might be a bit harsh, but clearly he gets the job done that people like. Most actors are not Gary Oldman broad in their ability.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
It may seem that way to you, but the people who have gone out and seen what actually happens disagree.
From a UNESCO review of the available literature;
The paper concludes that sex education programmes that are based on a comprehensive curriculum can delay the onset of sexual activity among adolescents and young people, reduce the frequency of intercourse, reduce the frequency of unprotected sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Furthermore, sex education programmes do not increase sexual activity among adolescents and young people and generally result in increased knowledge about human sexuality.
As to why... one of the things that adolescents like is discovery and breaking taboos. It's why they are both profoundly annoying and surprisingly life-enhancing to teach. If adults aren't talking about sex, it increases the taboo factor which increases the thrill.
It's what Scandinavians have got right. Talk about sex as a thing that happens in various forms. Domesticate it, so to speak. Seems to work in practice.
With all due respect, that comes from an international organization that is probably taking direct orders from Davos.
(Only kidding. But it was @Lucky you were talking too.)
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
Plenty of actors (Michael Caine, for instance) had great careers doing just that.
He even made his name as a Geordie with a cockney accent in "Get Carter".
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Is Roaster Ross going to get outraged by pantomimes?
His argument seems to be pantomime dames don't push gender ideology
I don't think Drag Queen Story Hour does either. This is just Moray copying US nonsense.
'Encouraging children to develop a love of reading through imaginative story time, while promoting inclusion, diversity and acceptance...' Now nobody wants intolerance but 6 and under is rather young to be discussing Trans
We teach kinds younger than that that there are different sexes. Is that wrong too?
Well there are, that is a biological fact
And there are transgender people. That is a sociological fact.
Only through surgery and even with that and hormones treatment trans cyclists are no longer allowed to compete in female races as even with hormone suppression they still have an advantage over female cyclists https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/65718748
No, transgender people are transgender even without undergoing surgery.
Maybe if you'd been taught this stuff at a younger age you'd be a little more clued in to the facts.
So you want to teach 6 year olds they are transgender? No wonder you on the left are out of touch!
You're confusing being taught that you are something, with being taught about other people. No wonder the Tories are out of touch with humanity.
It is not appropriate for 6 year olds or even older primary school children. It should be a secondary school issue only
Bollocks.
I literally head the same arguments made about not exposing kids to gay ideology when Section 28 was a thing.
My then 4 year old only had one question about attending a same sex wedding.
'Which one of you throws the bouquet, and can you make sure my dad catches it?'
I have a 5 year old and it's not appropriate to discuss sexual intercourse at that age.
Your five year old presumably knows that there are men and women. They don't need to hear about intercourse to have an understanding of that fact. They don't need to know about penetration to understand that some couples are different genders and some couples are the same gender. They don't need to know what adults do with their genitals to know that sometimes people are born as one gender but prefer to live as another.
You don't need to deliver all the yucky truth about everything all at once.
Personally I wouldn't allow any sex education or discussion of gender identity in schools until pupils are 11 or over and have reached puberty
Wait until kids have hit puberty before discussing puberty?
Talk about waiting until the horse has bolted before closing the door.
Unless you are a paedophile kids shoudn't be engaging in or discussing sex until they have reached puberty absolutely
Kids absolutely shouldn't be engaging in sex until they are young adults.
They should however be learning about it, at appropriate levels, before their hormones go wild rather than afterwards.
NO they should not. Absolutely not. They should only start to learn about sex, only at an appropriate level, from age 11 and only in more detail from 16, the age of consent
Okay.
So, when my eldest daughter was ten, one of her schoolfriends came to visit. She was the same age.
She (the schoolfriend) was extremely inappropriate towards me, to the point where I immediately went to get my wife and asked her to stay near me for the duration of this girl's visit, so she (the schoolfriend) never got to see me alone. This successfully dissuaded her from doing it any more (other than a few comments that got our eyebrows raising).
Should her parents have spoken to her about sex and what was and was not appropriate? I thought they should; she'd obviously picked up what she had from conversations with other children and what appeared to be early hormones. Personally, I thought she was going to be very vulnerable to any adult with paedophilic tendencies.
I take it you disagree?
Clearly an illustration of too much sexualisation of young people in our culture generally, when we didn't have as much sex in the media and more traditional Christian family values it was less of an issue
This particular event happened twenty years ago.
Kids have always talked between each other about sex. Discussions on that happened when I was a child in the Seventies, and this particular event happened twenty years ago.
Sexual abuse of children was more prevalent in the Seventies, Sixties, and Fifties - it was just brushed under the carpet and not discussed. Less sex in the media, more Christian family values, and more children getting abused and raped.
People just preferred to go into denial. That same tendency is visible in some today.
Is there any evidence there was more paedophilia in the fifties? I highly doubt it, we also had lower divorce rates, higher marriage rates and a birthrate above replacement level
There certainly was in boarding schools. And that was to some extent enabled by children’s ignorance, and the desire if those in authority (which you seem to have inherited) to brush the whole matter under the carpet.
No, it was enabled by insufficient safeguarding policies and procedures like now in who is hired and monitored and lack of background checks
It was enabled because the children had no idea what was happening to them in too many cases.
Because they were lectured not to speak to the strangers. Not to Mr Master in the dorm.
Is Roaster Ross going to get outraged by pantomimes?
His argument seems to be pantomime dames don't push gender ideology
I don't think Drag Queen Story Hour does either. This is just Moray copying US nonsense.
'Encouraging children to develop a love of reading through imaginative story time, while promoting inclusion, diversity and acceptance...' Now nobody wants intolerance but 6 and under is rather young to be discussing Trans
We teach kinds younger than that that there are different sexes. Is that wrong too?
Well there are, that is a biological fact
And there are transgender people. That is a sociological fact.
Only through surgery and even with that and hormones treatment trans cyclists are no longer allowed to compete in female races as even with hormone suppression they still have an advantage over female cyclists https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/65718748
No, transgender people are transgender even without undergoing surgery.
Maybe if you'd been taught this stuff at a younger age you'd be a little more clued in to the facts.
So you want to teach 6 year olds they are transgender? No wonder you on the left are out of touch!
You're confusing being taught that you are something, with being taught about other people. No wonder the Tories are out of touch with humanity.
It is not appropriate for 6 year olds or even older primary school children. It should be a secondary school issue only
Bollocks.
I literally head the same arguments made about not exposing kids to gay ideology when Section 28 was a thing.
My then 4 year old only had one question about attending a same sex wedding.
'Which one of you throws the bouquet, and can you make sure my dad catches it?'
I have a 5 year old and it's not appropriate to discuss sexual intercourse at that age.
Your five year old presumably knows that there are men and women. They don't need to hear about intercourse to have an understanding of that fact. They don't need to know about penetration to understand that some couples are different genders and some couples are the same gender. They don't need to know what adults do with their genitals to know that sometimes people are born as one gender but prefer to live as another.
You don't need to deliver all the yucky truth about everything all at once.
Personally I wouldn't allow any sex education or discussion of gender identity in schools until pupils are 11 or over and have reached puberty
Wait until kids have hit puberty before discussing puberty?
Talk about waiting until the horse has bolted before closing the door.
Unless you are a paedophile kids shoudn't be engaging in or discussing sex until they have reached puberty absolutely
Kids absolutely shouldn't be engaging in sex until they are young adults.
They should however be learning about it, at appropriate levels, before their hormones go wild rather than afterwards.
NO they should not. Absolutely not. They should only start to learn about sex, only at an appropriate level, from age 11 and only in more detail from 16, the age of consent
Okay.
So, when my eldest daughter was ten, one of her schoolfriends came to visit. She was the same age.
She (the schoolfriend) was extremely inappropriate towards me, to the point where I immediately went to get my wife and asked her to stay near me for the duration of this girl's visit, so she (the schoolfriend) never got to see me alone. This successfully dissuaded her from doing it any more (other than a few comments that got our eyebrows raising).
Should her parents have spoken to her about sex and what was and was not appropriate? I thought they should; she'd obviously picked up what she had from conversations with other children and what appeared to be early hormones. Personally, I thought she was going to be very vulnerable to any adult with paedophilic tendencies.
I take it you disagree?
Clearly an illustration of too much sexualisation of young people in our culture generally, when we didn't have as much sex in the media and more traditional Christian family values it was less of an issue
This particular event happened twenty years ago.
Kids have always talked between each other about sex. Discussions on that happened when I was a child in the Seventies, and this particular event happened twenty years ago.
Sexual abuse of children was more prevalent in the Seventies, Sixties, and Fifties - it was just brushed under the carpet and not discussed. Less sex in the media, more Christian family values, and more children getting abused and raped.
People just preferred to go into denial. That same tendency is visible in some today.
Is there any evidence there was more paedophilia in the fifties? I highly doubt it, we also had lower divorce rates, higher marriage rates and a birthrate above replacement level
There certainly was in boarding schools. And that was to some extent enabled by children’s ignorance, and the desire if those in authority (which you seem to have inherited) to brush the whole matter under the carpet.
No, it was enabled by insufficient safeguarding policies and procedures like now in who is hired and monitored and lack of background checks
It was enabled because the children had no idea what was happening to them in too many cases.
Because they were lectured not to speak to the strangers. Not to Mr Master in the dorm.
They still aren't, respect for authority is important.
However safeguarding and background and criminal records checks in boarding schools now are far more rigorous, as indeed they are in schools generally and the Scouts etc than they were in the 1970s
Except in Ampleforth.
And OFSTED.
"Far more rigorous"? Recently when bored I read a recent back issue of the old boys' zine for the boarding school I went to - I don't subscribe - and there was an article by a housemaster who was blithely explaining how it works wonders to wear an expensive shirt and haircut when you're showing one of those inspector johnnies around.
Then there was a policy on bullying which started off by saying there are 3 kinds of bullying - of teachers by teachers, teachers by boys, and boys by teachers. (FWIR they left out bullying by teachers of boys.) That's how "seriously" they take bullying.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
An English man was on a business trip to foreign parts, talking to some colleagues who didn't speak English as their first language. The talk turned to families, and the Englishman asked one of them "how about you, do you have any children?"
"Alas no," came the reply, "for my wife, she is impregnable—"
"Ah, please excuse," interjected the second colleague. "My friend here has made a mistake with his English. He means to say his wife is unbearable."
At this the third colleague grinned widely. "They are both wrong of course. She is in fact inconceivable."
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
Plenty of actors (Michael Caine, for instance) had great careers doing just that.
He even made his name as a Geordie with a cockney accent in "Get Carter".
I thought it was as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, a distinctly upper class officer, in Zulu.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
I saw a series of those programmes recently, and they were weirdly compelling, mostly to spot the tropes and formulas that became apparent very quickly. Like the one guy who is the 'skeptic' whose job is to go 'Well, I don't know it could have been [insert normal explanation], but it is weird', to 'experts' who are entirely self proclaimed without even an irrelevant PhD or job as the caterer at the FBI to lend authority.
All narrated by someone who also does serious documentaries (or sounds like someone who does)
I don't think we've beaten Paul Merton's description of Erich von Daniken as being the chap where the answer was always No to his quesitons.
"Could this be a 14th century flying saucer?" "No" "Were the Aztecs the first astronauts?" "No"
At the age of 19, he was given a four-month suspended sentence for theft.[6] He left the school and was apprenticed to a Swiss hotelier for a time,[7] before moving to Egypt. In December 1964, von Däniken wrote Hatten unsere Vorfahren Besuch aus dem Weltraum? ("Were Our Ancestors Visited from Space?") for the German-Canadian periodical Der Nordwesten.[8] While in Egypt, he was involved in a jewelry deal which resulted in a nine-month conviction for fraud and embezzlement upon his return to Switzerland.[6]
Following his release, von Däniken became a manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos, Switzerland, during which time he wrote Chariots of the Gods? (German: Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, literally "Memories of the Future"), working on the manuscript late at night after the hotel's guests had retired.[9] The draft of the book was turned down by several publishers. Econ Verlag (now part of Ullstein Verlag) was willing to publish the book after a complete reworking by a professional author, Utz Utermann, who used the pseudonym of Wilhelm Roggersdorf. Utermann was a former editor of the Nazi Party's newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and had been a Nazi bestselling author.[10] The re-write of Chariots of the Gods? was accepted for publication early in 1967, but not printed until March 1968.[9]
I knew about the hotel in Davos but not about Utermann and his background. What were the bestsellers that he wrote during the Nazi period? Link 10 from the Wikipedia article is broken.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
Casting for the Tiger Woods biopic will be interesting. Good luck finding the 1/4 Thai 1/4 Chinese 1/4 Caucausian, 1/8 African American, 1/8 Native American actors for the auditions.
Technology has the answer. Tiger Woods can play himself, suitable de-aged where necessary. If he dies before the picture is made - gentlemen, AI can rebuild him.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
😎😶
And on we rumble, endless attention seeking whistle blowers with no evidence. Keep believing, Leon, keep believing.
My point has always been that we are witnessing increasingly inexplicable behaviour from American officials - military, political, intel - which CAN only be explained if 1 you accept they are all going mad, 2 there is some incredibly massive psyops operation (who? When? Why?), or 3 they genuinely have evidence of non-human intelligence
Any of these explanations is surpassingly interesting. They all remain possible. Recent evidence points more towards explanation 3
My theory? Satellite tv. Endless channels need filling. Endless ghost hunting shows seeing ‘orbs’, commonly known as specks of dust. Endless Bigfoot programmes- is this the episode where they finally find Bigfoot? Clearly not as it would have been headline news. There is a huge market for this kind of stuff, and grifters gotta grift.
Grifters?
The journalist who broke this story is an extremely senior New York Times veteran. These people are not loons. Nor do they need the money. They have reputations
“To be clear -- the Washington Post did not pass on our UAP story. Leslie and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly. The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait. #UAP #UFOs #flyingsaucers #ET #aliens #extraterrestrials”
The whistle blowers. The next generation Bob Lazars. No evidence anywhere. The ‘best’ evidence of UAPs totally underwhelming. Remember the balloon flap of recent months? What happened to that?
You’re the twit who totally denied lab leak until about 3 weeks ago.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
I supose my problem with this is that one would expect that, having had high quality cameras being carried by practially every single person in the Western world and the majority in the whole world for the last 10-15 years, we would have seen a massive upsurge by many orders of magnitude in the number of recorded, photographed sitings of alien craft compared to, say, 30 years ago. And yet we do not. We get the same rare blurry images from the public and a few debatable images from the military or from civilain aviation but that explosion of confirmable sitings just hasn't happened.
So unless the aliens suddeny decided to bugger off just at the moment we were developing the ability for teh man in the treet to record them, I think it is just so much hokum.
I am not in any way intellectualy opposed to the idea of aliens. The idea that there are not millions of civilisations out there seems inconceivable to me. The idea they are managing to float around Earth with exactly the same degree of secrecy as they did 30 or 50 years ago seems.. unlikely.
I agree. The lack of multiple photos from excellent phone cameras is a major pointer AGAINST “option 3”
But then we are left with option 2: the USG is contriving some massive psyops…. But there are serious problems with that, too
It’s a delicious mystery
Given the extent to which phone pictures are "enhanced" by AI, there is a fourth option.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Please unban @MrEd so we can hear some ludicrous explanation about how this is all a stich up and Biden has done far worse
To be fair, Biden is not exactly smashing it out of the park when it comes to a head to head with Trump. Whatever you - and others - may think that Biden is a great President, he is not convincing a vast majority of the American public.
What in your view is a "vast majority"?
FDR 1936, LBJ 1964, RN 1972? Certainly by THAT measure, your point is spot on!
Sorry hadn't hit send from earlier.
RCP has Biden down vs Trump in a head to head and his approval rating at 40%.
Even you @SeaShantyIrish2 cannot be saying that 40% is great for an incumbent.
Not much news about the Ukrainian offensive today, drowned out by the consequences of the dam destruction, but the Washington Post do have this:
“Administration officials were encouraged by better-than-expected progress Monday, as Ukrainian units pushed through heavily mined areas to advance between five and 10 kilometers in some areas of the long front.”
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
And yet, that appears to be exactly what has happened.
That's such an extraordinary change I would assume something else is going on. Social media?
At a guess, it's linked to the (effective) raising of the school leaving age from 16 to 18, which Gordon Brown legislated for and came into force in the early years of the Cameron government. (Technically, you don't have to stay in school, but the overwhelming majority do.)
I think there is something more than that happening though. Look at the rates of teetotalism in younger people. There has been a remarkable increase in the numbers of students who don't drink. I have no idea why this is but there is a definite trend towards shunning the vices at the moment amongst younger people
They see alcohol as just like smoking.
Illegal drugs are just so much cheaper if you want to clock out for a while. Economics is, sadly, no longer taught in Scottish schools so the next uptick in drug deaths after an extra 20p is put on a can of cider will come as a total surprise.
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
It may seem that way to you, but the people who have gone out and seen what actually happens disagree.
From a UNESCO review of the available literature;
The paper concludes that sex education programmes that are based on a comprehensive curriculum can delay the onset of sexual activity among adolescents and young people, reduce the frequency of intercourse, reduce the frequency of unprotected sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Furthermore, sex education programmes do not increase sexual activity among adolescents and young people and generally result in increased knowledge about human sexuality.
As to why... one of the things that adolescents like is discovery and breaking taboos. It's why they are both profoundly annoying and surprisingly life-enhancing to teach. If adults aren't talking about sex, it increases the taboo factor which increases the thrill.
It's what Scandinavians have got right. Talk about sex as a thing that happens in various forms. Domesticate it, so to speak. Seems to work in practice.
Yes, it's interesting to compare Denmark when I grew up (the 60s/70s) with the UK now. The Danes had pretty much arrived at the same point that we have, viewing sex as something people enjoyed but not something you only did with one person in your whole life. But Britain is still much more prurient - people still get a kick out of talking about boobs and bums and willies and the nation is gripped by whether Philip Schofield did or didn't have sex with someone (yes, I know that there's an angle about possibly improper incentives, but I don't believe that's why people are interested).
Danish doesn't even have sexual swearwords (though they've picked up 'fuck' from English) - if you want to insult someone you say "idiot" or the like, and swearing at someone with a body part just sounds peculiar, like saying "You ankle!"
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
It may seem that way to you, but the people who have gone out and seen what actually happens disagree.
From a UNESCO review of the available literature;
The paper concludes that sex education programmes that are based on a comprehensive curriculum can delay the onset of sexual activity among adolescents and young people, reduce the frequency of intercourse, reduce the frequency of unprotected sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Furthermore, sex education programmes do not increase sexual activity among adolescents and young people and generally result in increased knowledge about human sexuality.
As to why... one of the things that adolescents like is discovery and breaking taboos. It's why they are both profoundly annoying and surprisingly life-enhancing to teach. If adults aren't talking about sex, it increases the taboo factor which increases the thrill.
It's what Scandinavians have got right. Talk about sex as a thing that happens in various forms. Domesticate it, so to speak. Seems to work in practice.
Yes, it's interesting to compare Denmark when I grew up (the 60s/70s) with the UK now. The Danes had pretty much arrived at the same point that we have, viewing sex as something people enjoyed but not something you only did with one person in your whole life. But Britain is still much more prurient - people still get a kick out of talking about boobs and bums and willies and the nation is gripped by whether Philip Schofield did or didn't have sex with someone (yes, I know that there's an angle about possibly improper incentives, but I don't believe that's why people are interested).
Danish doesn't even have sexual swearwords (though they've picked up 'fuck' from English) - if you want to insult someone you say "idiot" or the like, and swearing at someone with a body part just sounds peculiar, like saying "You ankle!"
French Canadians in Quebec swear using words describing church items
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
For fans of 80s music, the Human League are still performing live (with original members from 1981). This is a video of them in San Francisco just a few days ago.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
Korean chap. He was conscripted into the Japanese Army, was captured during the border clashes with the Soviets in 1939, conscripted into the Red Army, then captured by the Nazis during Barbarossa (1941).
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Sunil von Prasannan
You are as qualified to add "von" to your name as Carl Von Clausewitz was.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
Yes. It's in the beginning of one of Anthony Beevor's books I believe. Japanese too.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
It seems vanishingly unlikely to me that pregnant teenagers are pregnant because they and/or their partners don't know how babies are made. Perhaps this is true in a few edge cases where people may have mental development issues. Many girls see pregnancy as a way of leaving home and being given the wherewithal to live. Assuming a decline in teenage motherhood is desirable (rather than welcoming it as a way to address population decline), I really don't think it can be addressed by sex education at a younger age.
It may seem that way to you, but the people who have gone out and seen what actually happens disagree.
From a UNESCO review of the available literature;
The paper concludes that sex education programmes that are based on a comprehensive curriculum can delay the onset of sexual activity among adolescents and young people, reduce the frequency of intercourse, reduce the frequency of unprotected sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Furthermore, sex education programmes do not increase sexual activity among adolescents and young people and generally result in increased knowledge about human sexuality.
As to why... one of the things that adolescents like is discovery and breaking taboos. It's why they are both profoundly annoying and surprisingly life-enhancing to teach. If adults aren't talking about sex, it increases the taboo factor which increases the thrill.
It's what Scandinavians have got right. Talk about sex as a thing that happens in various forms. Domesticate it, so to speak. Seems to work in practice.
Yes, it's interesting to compare Denmark when I grew up (the 60s/70s) with the UK now. The Danes had pretty much arrived at the same point that we have, viewing sex as something people enjoyed but not something you only did with one person in your whole life. But Britain is still much more prurient - people still get a kick out of talking about boobs and bums and willies and the nation is gripped by whether Philip Schofield did or didn't have sex with someone (yes, I know that there's an angle about possibly improper incentives, but I don't believe that's why people are interested).
Danish doesn't even have sexual swearwords (though they've picked up 'fuck' from English) - if you want to insult someone you say "idiot" or the like, and swearing at someone with a body part just sounds peculiar, like saying "You ankle!"
Mandarin Chinese doesn't have it either. Stupid egg is the tops.
For fans of 80s music, the Human League are still performing live (with original members from 1981). This is a video of them in San Francisco just a few days ago.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
I always liked this story of Joseph Beyrle who fought both with the US 101st and, after escaping from a German POW camp, with the Russian Guards Tank Army as they advanced on Berlin. The only serviceman to receive both the Bronze Star and the order of the Red Star.
His son served as US ambassador to Russia during the Obama presidency.
Charles Kennedy is trending on Twitter. Not sure why. Maybe something to do with Ian Blackford standing down in his old constituency.
People seem to be blaming Blackford for Kennedy's death (because he took Kennedy's seat at the 2015 election)
Seems very unfair on Ian Blackford... Ultimately the only one responsible for Charles Kennedy's death was Charles Kennedy.
I don't mean to sound unkind, especially as I respected what Kennedy did around the Iraq war, but it's just as well Blackford won because we shouldn't have such self-destructive characters in parliament. It's really not fair on constituents to have someone who is sozzled half the time in charge of important things.
Charles Kennedy is trending on Twitter. Not sure why. Maybe something to do with Ian Blackford standing down in his old constituency.
People seem to be blaming Blackford for Kennedy's death (because he took Kennedy's seat at the 2015 election)
Seems very unfair on Ian Blackford... Ultimately the only one responsible for Charles Kennedy's death was Charles Kennedy.
Unless there was skullduggery going on you cannot blame someone for defeating a political opponent, whatever subsequently happened.
Not the exact same type of thing, but it puts me in mind of the ridiculous question Paxman asked Galloway about whether he was proud for having 'got rid of' one of the few black women in parliament, as if there was something unreasonable about having taken on and defeated an opponent.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
I always liked this story of Joseph Beyrle who fought both with the US 101st and, after escaping from a German POW camp, with the Russian Guards Tank Army as they advanced on Berlin. The only serviceman to receive both the Bronze Star and the order of the Red Star.
His son served as US ambassador to Russia during the Obama presidency.
I'll try for a distraction - here's yet another story about actors not understanding the concept of acting
Michael Sheen: ‘I find it very hard to accept actors playing Welsh characters when they aren’t...' Has he taken the concept of authentic casting to a whole new level? Ahead of his latest BBC drama Best Interests, the star explains all https://t.co/VqYDu701zh @emmarevell: This attitude is so exhausting. Acting by it's very definition is pretending to be something or someone you are not
@JonHollis9: Particularly given Michael Sheen has played a vampire, a werewolf, an angel, Jesus, Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (multiple times).
Imagine the state of his career if he were only allowed to play middle aged Welsh men.
I remember reading Maureen Lipman saying something like "If this nonsense carries on, you'll only be allowed to play yourself".
'Authenticity' in acting is one of those concepts where I don't even understand why and how it arose as a supposedly progressive idea when pushed to the extremes we now see.
I get concerns about apparent lack of ethnic roles which are not stereotypes, and the solution of improving that with a combination of more roles which would be appropriate (and not distracting, like Benedict Cumberbatch playing Nelson Mandela or Idris Elba playing Oliver Cromwell) and race-blind casting where it doesn't even matter seems already to be working, yet at the exact same time the opposite of raceblind casting, where the actor should match exactly, or as near as possible, to the role, seems increasingly popular.
There's been controversy down in Chichester where a black actor has been cast as a Nazi officer in a coming production of The Sound of Music. The Von Trapp children appear to be various ethnicities.
What’s the world coming to when we can’t insist on Aryans playing Nazis ?
Hmmm - only people from the Indian subcontinent can play Nazis? It’s an idea I suppose.
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
Wasn't there supposed to be some Chinese or Korean chap who got forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army and then the Nazi army over the course of the war?
I always liked this story of Joseph Beyrle who fought both with the US 101st and, after escaping from a German POW camp, with the Russian Guards Tank Army as they advanced on Berlin. The only serviceman to receive both the Bronze Star and the order of the Red Star.
His son served as US ambassador to Russia during the Obama presidency.
Charles Kennedy is trending on Twitter. Not sure why. Maybe something to do with Ian Blackford standing down in his old constituency.
People seem to be blaming Blackford for Kennedy's death (because he took Kennedy's seat at the 2015 election)
Seems very unfair on Ian Blackford... Ultimately the only one responsible for Charles Kennedy's death was Charles Kennedy.
I don't mean to sound unkind, especially as I respected what Kennedy did around the Iraq war, but it's just as well Blackford won because we shouldn't have such self-destructive characters in parliament. It's really not fair on constituents to have someone who is sozzled half the time in charge of important things.
See also Johnson, B.
Kennedy drunk was a better reader of Iraq than Blair sober.
Charles Kennedy is trending on Twitter. Not sure why. Maybe something to do with Ian Blackford standing down in his old constituency.
People seem to be blaming Blackford for Kennedy's death (because he took Kennedy's seat at the 2015 election)
Seems very unfair on Ian Blackford... Ultimately the only one responsible for Charles Kennedy's death was Charles Kennedy.
I don't mean to sound unkind, especially as I respected what Kennedy did around the Iraq war, but it's just as well Blackford won because we shouldn't have such self-destructive characters in parliament. It's really not fair on constituents to have someone who is sozzled half the time in charge of important things.
See also Johnson, B.
Kennedy drunk was a better reader of Iraq than Blair sober.
Churchill was frequently drunk
Trump is genuinely teetotal
How can we really know whether Trump is or not? It's all publicity management at the end of the day as far as politicians are concerned. Wasn't there a famous politician who managed to keep secret the fact he was slightly disabled in some way? Can't remember who it was now.
Some Ukrainian officials are complaining about that. But what language did "Servant of the People" first appear in?
The Russian language may not be quite as great as the English one, but still you gotta have respect for a language that calls sleepwalking "lunatism" (лунатизм).
Charles Kennedy is trending on Twitter. Not sure why. Maybe something to do with Ian Blackford standing down in his old constituency.
People seem to be blaming Blackford for Kennedy's death (because he took Kennedy's seat at the 2015 election)
Seems very unfair on Ian Blackford... Ultimately the only one responsible for Charles Kennedy's death was Charles Kennedy.
I don't mean to sound unkind, especially as I respected what Kennedy did around the Iraq war, but it's just as well Blackford won because we shouldn't have such self-destructive characters in parliament. It's really not fair on constituents to have someone who is sozzled half the time in charge of important things.
See also Johnson, B.
Kennedy drunk was a better reader of Iraq than Blair sober.
Churchill was frequently drunk
Trump is genuinely teetotal
How can we really know whether Trump is or not? It's all publicity management at the end of the day as far as politicians are concerned. Wasn't there a famous politician who managed to keep secret the fact he was slightly disabled in some way? Can't remember who it was now.
Comments
From a UNESCO review of the available literature;
The paper concludes that sex education programmes that are based on a comprehensive curriculum can delay the onset of sexual activity among adolescents and young people, reduce the frequency of intercourse, reduce the frequency of unprotected sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Furthermore, sex education programmes do not increase sexual activity among adolescents and young people and generally result in increased knowledge about human sexuality.
https://healtheducationresources.unesco.org/library/documents/impact-sex-education-sexual-behaviour-young-people
As to why... one of the things that adolescents like is discovery and breaking taboos. It's why they are both profoundly annoying and surprisingly life-enhancing to teach. If adults aren't talking about sex, it increases the taboo factor which increases the thrill.
It's what Scandinavians have got right. Talk about sex as a thing that happens in various forms. Domesticate it, so to speak. Seems to work in practice.
You can dismiss aliens or ET as an explanation - that’s entirely plausible - but then you have to explain the behaviour by large numbers of very senior American generals, spies, politicians, journalists, senators, even presidents
It’s not just “grifters grifting” FFS. That’s imbecilic
We do take seriously the need to give our girls a thoughtful rounded education and the critical faculties and confidence to recognise ignorant bullshit when they encounter it.
All narrated by someone who also does serious documentaries (or sounds like someone who does)
I don't think we've beaten Paul Merton's description of Erich von Daniken as being the chap where the answer was always No to his quesitons.
"Could this be a 14th century flying saucer?"
"No"
"Were the Aztecs the first astronauts?"
"No"
(These may be actual Danikenite claims)
Dismissing grifters grifting as imbecilic is as foolish as dismissing them doing so with regards to lab leak as imbecilic.
I think more than that though, in that there are some men who cannot be in the same house as women, and not feel they should penetrate them. I fear for their real step-daughters and step-sisters etc, and there are many families where step-relatives share a house, often unsupervised.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/conceptionandfertilityrates/bulletins/conceptionstatistics/2021#:~:text=The conception rate for women,women of the same age.
(Sadly, looking at the wikipedia, it's not actually about a wartime black Gestapo officer, for shame. I have seen a video review of The Black Six though, that's just a biker movie).
I’ve been following UFO and other Fortean stuff all my life. This is just another flap. There is no evidence. Go back to the dawn of radar. Plenty of weird stuff seen. Radar gets better, less weird stuff. Arguably each new technology or iteration leads to new flaps of stuff, just like the current fluff about balloons. Because detectors can suddenly start to see them, doesn't make them new or turn them into alien craft.
I would be the happiest person on PB if it turned out to be aliens. I think it would be an epochal event.
I just don’t think the bullshit being pushed is it.
I do worry about first contact though, since no matter what it might involve at some point some human somehwere will want to have sex with the visitor, and that might offend them.
"The international evidence for reducing teenage pregnancy is clear 1,2,3. Building the knowledge, skills, resilience and aspirations of young people and providing easy access to welcoming services, helps them to delay sex until they are ready to enjoy healthy, consensual relationships and to use contraception to prevent unplanned pregnancy. An open culture and ease of parental communication around sexual issues are also associated with lower teenage pregnancy rates"
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/836597/Teenage_Pregnancy_Prevention_Framework.pdf
There was a pretty good idea of both contraception and sex education when I was a young teenager, and a lot of sexual activity. The culture in the Eighties was much more promiscuous than now.
So unless the aliens suddeny decided to bugger off just at the moment we were developing the ability for teh man in the treet to record them, I think it is just so much hokum.
I am not in any way intellectualy opposed to the idea of aliens. The idea that there are not millions of civilisations out there seems inconceivable to me. The idea they are managing to float around Earth with exactly the same degree of secrecy as they did 30 or 50 years ago seems.. unlikely.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/836597/Teenage_Pregnancy_Prevention_Framework.pdf
This isn't a middle class dinner party.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/conceptionandfertilityrates/bulletins/conceptionstatistics/2021#teenage-conceptions
With the exception of knife crime between young black men, there has been quite a drop off in casual violence too.
All might be true, but it's not really an explanation even if it is. High costs prohibit certain vices from spreading so much, which then means the next youngest also don't get into it, and the superfast spread of cultural norms online helps enforce monotonous acceptance of prevailing orthodoxy (or pushing into acceptable sub-niches) without needing other rebellious behaviour like drinking and drugs?
But then we are left with option 2: the USG is contriving some massive psyops…. But there are serious problems with that, too
It’s a delicious mystery
It's not just about Sex and Relationship Education of course but that is a key component.
This study is interesting:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30449-4/fulltext#seccestitle10
This is actually a cross-party government success, instigated under Labour, continued under the Conservative/LD coalition and the succeeding Conservative governments.
To throw something in to the discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
At the age of 19, he was given a four-month suspended sentence for theft.[6] He left the school and was apprenticed to a Swiss hotelier for a time,[7] before moving to Egypt. In December 1964, von Däniken wrote Hatten unsere Vorfahren Besuch aus dem Weltraum? ("Were Our Ancestors Visited from Space?") for the German-Canadian periodical Der Nordwesten.[8] While in Egypt, he was involved in a jewelry deal which resulted in a nine-month conviction for fraud and embezzlement upon his return to Switzerland.[6]
Following his release, von Däniken became a manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos, Switzerland, during which time he wrote Chariots of the Gods? (German: Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, literally "Memories of the Future"), working on the manuscript late at night after the hotel's guests had retired.[9] The draft of the book was turned down by several publishers. Econ Verlag (now part of Ullstein Verlag) was willing to publish the book after a complete reworking by a professional author, Utz Utermann, who used the pseudonym of Wilhelm Roggersdorf. Utermann was a former editor of the Nazi Party's newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and had been a Nazi bestselling author.[10] The re-write of Chariots of the Gods? was accepted for publication early in 1967, but not printed until March 1968.[9]
It's like how there's been a bit more joking in the last few years about The Rock being one of the highest paid actors in the world despite not being a good actor. Might be a bit harsh, but clearly he gets the job done that people like. Most actors are not Gary Oldman broad in their ability.
(Only kidding. But it was @Lucky you were talking too.)
A seventeen year lag on these two stats. It's not inconceivable (
Then there was a policy on bullying which started off by saying there are 3 kinds of bullying - of teachers by teachers, teachers by boys, and boys by teachers. (FWIR they left out bullying by teachers of boys.) That's how "seriously" they take bullying.
An English man was on a business trip to foreign parts, talking to some colleagues who didn't speak English as their first language. The talk turned to families, and the Englishman asked one of them "how about you, do you have any children?"
"Alas no," came the reply, "for my wife, she is impregnable—"
"Ah, please excuse," interjected the second colleague. "My friend here has made a mistake with his English. He means to say his wife is unbearable."
At this the third colleague grinned widely. "They are both wrong of course. She is in fact inconceivable."
Now I’m imagining a Bollywood version of Downfall….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Legion
£37,000 a year, the amount needed to retire on 'comfortably', takes diligent effort"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/pensions-retirement/financial-planning/annual-income-retirement-fund-pension-savings-37000/
RCP has Biden down vs Trump in a head to head and his approval rating at 40%.
Even you @SeaShantyIrish2 cannot be saying that 40% is great for an incumbent.
“Administration officials were encouraged by better-than-expected progress Monday, as Ukrainian units pushed through heavily mined areas to advance between five and 10 kilometers in some areas of the long front.”
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1666197378645327872
Danish doesn't even have sexual swearwords (though they've picked up 'fuck' from English) - if you want to insult someone you say "idiot" or the like, and swearing at someone with a body part just sounds peculiar, like saying "You ankle!"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgré-nous Etc
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Câlisse
For fans of 80s music, the Human League are still performing live (with original members from 1981). This is a video of them in San Francisco just a few days ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3vr4DvA-1E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoyWb6kZKns
Japanese too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Kyoungjong
Stupid egg is the tops.
Seems very unfair on Ian Blackford... Ultimately the only one responsible for Charles Kennedy's death was Charles Kennedy.
His son served as US ambassador to Russia during the Obama presidency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beyrle
See also Johnson, B.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023_Spanish_general_election
Not the exact same type of thing, but it puts me in mind of the ridiculous question Paxman asked Galloway about whether he was proud for having 'got rid of' one of the few black women in parliament, as if there was something unreasonable about having taken on and defeated an opponent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_García
Churchill was frequently drunk
Trump is genuinely teetotal
The Russian language may not be quite as great as the English one, but still you gotta have respect for a language that calls sleepwalking "lunatism" (лунатизм).