On the BBC website, those (like me) who mocked the new McQualifications get a right telling off by Mike Baker for being snobbish.

Hmm. Another chance to sound off about them. In numbered list format, even.

• It’s fine for companies to choose to train their staff and give them proof of having achieved a certain standard of competence in the company’s work. It’s hardly the concern of public awarding bodies.
• Despite a rhetoric of opening up the opportunities to gain qualifications to the less academic, these “qualifications” implicitly place the holder firmly in the “peon” class.
• At the same time, they create a further “under-peon” class of people who haven’t got them. So, they put people who haven’t got them at an unnecessary disadvantage in terms of getting jobs or promotion.
• Vocational qualifications being what they are, they will reward those people who can fill out the standard phrases in their standard portfolio in a standard way. This means that people who are actually good at being shift supervisors but rubbish at documenting their achievements will do worse than those who are good at collecting documents.
• Any one of average intelligence can pick up the skills needed to work in most jobs, with a bit of experience. What difference does a piece of paper make except to limit access to those jobs?
• There is a big UK push for all under-18s having to be in “education or training.” Hmm. Education that stretches the mind, maybe. Training in craft skills, maybe. Training in tasks that any able-bodied person can pick up in a couple of weeks, no.

Is objecting to McQuals for McJobs being “snobbish” toward the recipients? I think the disdain they rouse comes from a recognition that these are worthless bits of paper that just attempt to draw an obscuring veil over the massive deskilling of workers and the failure of the education system to develop people’s real potential.

The Mail on Sunday has a picture of a “Portuguese drifter” who is the “spitting image” of the “Madeleine suspect.” The only response to this is “I spit on your image recognition capacities…” Apart from longish dark hair, there are no points of resemblance between the absurd “sketch” and the photograph of a newspaper-delivery man who lives 80 miles away.

And let’s get back to the “witness” who claims this is the same man.

Well, blow me down with a copy of the Mail folded in a fan shape, who is it but “Witness Gail Cooper”

Witness Gail Cooper, who saw a man lurking near children in Praia da Luz just days before Madeleine vanished, said Mr Agostinho was “the spitting image” of the man she saw.

I must mention that Gail Coper’s holiday was OVER before the McCanns stepped off the plane. She can only be a “witness” to there having been a person in that area that she – with her strangely unparallelled knowledge of the secret hearts of men – regarded as looking disreputable. (He walked in the rain and looked a bit Moroccan – prima facie evidence of guilt to Middle England.)

Gail Cooper’s shady-looking Moroccan doesn’t quite constitute a

latest e-fit of a possible kidnapper.

A “possible kidnapper”,? This must be only in the sense that anyone spotted in Praia da Luz who wasn’t an English holiday-maker somehow fits this role? (Set aside such niceties as how you define kidnapping. Doesn’t that mean capturing someone for ransom?) There is still no evidence of a kidnap.

No matter how many self-serving detectives earn their fees by keeping these unproven theories on the front pages of the tabloids, there is NO EVIDENCE that Madeleine was kidnapped or abducted. There appears to be no convincing evidence of what happened.

Hence, I favour an alien abduction theory. If the press or the McCann machine will pay me, I will willingly go into space and search for the alien abductors. The truth is surely out there.

The Mail on Sunday article suggests that the correct British holiday-maker response to seeing any unkempt Portuguese person speaking is to panic.

Moments later a woman raced out of a nearby villa, shouting and calling to the children, and then scooped them up and took them away from the man.

Harsh as this may sound, Mail readers – if you are frightened of anyone who’s not English, take your vacations in the West Country or the Lake District. Then, you can run to the local police if you accidentally spot anyone who looks vaguely North African….

Just to see how far the hysteria has spread:

Meanwhile a potential sighting of Madeleine in Chile with a man who looked like the Mrs Cooper sketch was ruled out by police.
Detectives were called to the Gabriel Mistral museum in Vicuna after a man spotted a girl who resembled Madeleine, but the girl was revealed to be American Haylee Dreyer, six, who was on holiday in Vicuna with her Chilean grandparents.

Urgent advice to anyone who looks a bit Iberian or Moroccan

Never go to a tourist spot with any young blonde female relatives.

Somebody PLEASE tell me how you can get a job where your employers don’t miss 4.9 billion Euros. ($7,156,009,000 according to http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic)

The Times story is headlined

Jerome Kerviel named in €5bn bank trading fraud
….
The French bank Société Générale stunned financial markets today by revealing that it had been the victim of a near-€5 billion (£3.7 billion) rogue trading fraud,

In the UK, Northern Rock also managed to lose a good few billion pounds without apparently noticing anything amiss. Now the tax payer is making up the shortfall, although for some mysterious financial logic it seems that benefiting Virgin is the appropriate way to sort this out….

Thefts of that order beggar belief. The CIA factbook puts the UK GDP per person at 318,000 US Dollar i.e 217,760 Euros, according to Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, this isn’t a University paper, ok?) That means, if I am interpreting a billion Euros correctly that the French bank lost the annual income of about 22,502 UK citizens. Or, alternatively, an amount that the average UK citizen would expect to pass through their hands if they lived 22,502 years.

US citizens are better off than UK citizens. The lost/stolen sum would only cover the annual income of 155,565 US citizens. According to Wikipedia, the world’s richest country, is Luxembourg. It would only cover the annual income of 88,564 Luxembourg residents. But then again, it would cover the annual income of 11,926,682 Malawi citizens….

So tell me again, please, how do I get a job where I can make off with this sort of money..