Is hosted by Mr Eugenides who through no fault of his own links to some depressing material.

He leads us to Philobiblon reporting on A Female Future discussion. Baroness Kate Parminter (LibDem) noted that in looking at secondary schools for her daughter, she found that one she had otherwise liked offered cheerleading as an after-school club. “I want that to stop.”

Why can’t so-called Liberal so-called Democratic people stop telling other people what to do?

Meanwhile it turns out that without taxpayers’ money, breastfeeding in Haringey is not happening on the scale needed to save us all huge sums of money. You try to follow the argument, as I can’t.

The core of it seems to be that there are potential benefits to be had from collective action, but no easy way to capture them. So Haringey must spend money on breastfeeding experts to achieve a share of a purely theoretical saving far down the line. Ditto for so many other things, which takes us to Communism as the way to bring everything under control once and for all. 

The result of that Ultimate Rationality is for everyone to behold in N Korea and Cuba – people get to run the country because they are the immediate relatives of the last person to run the country.

Whatever the opposite of natural selection based on fitness for purpose is, that is it. (And, yes, I’m not a republican. I can tolerate and even support some historic traditional anomalies such as the public role of the Royal Family here in the UK. Just not raving collectivist lunacy.)

Elsewhere at BBRU an anguished activist/campaigner frets over how to achieve meaningful change. Maybe the problem is that people reasonably disagree on what is meaningful, and what needs to be changed? Just a thought.

On to BBRU 285, hosted by Cabalamat. Please send your suggestions to britblog [at] gmail.com.