Forever A Boxing Day Sale

Some years ago I read that,in the Russian Church, Christmas is a greater festival than Easter, that for them the primary fact of Christianity is the Incarnation of God.
I do not know how true this is, but I was interested to read it. And yesterday, after attending church, one of the little Revoltettes asked me 'what is the meaning of Immanuel?' 'God with us' I replied.
I suppose if we asked everybody what Christmas means to them, they would give a slightly different answer, but for me it is this; Christmas is about God being with us, not just about God walking with me, holding me up, sustaining me, but about God holding up the whole of Creation and sustaining it. God is love, and it is God's love that gives us breath and gives us meaning. God's love is eternal, and to live with God is to live eternally. It is God's love that gives light to the darkness, meaning to the chaos. Without love there is just appetite, self, and death. Without God it is never Christmas and forever a Boxing Day sale.

Robert Southwell - The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
'Alas!' quoth he, 'but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorn;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls:
For which I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.'
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Reasons Not To Give To Oxfam

Yesterday afternoon I was in the centre of Manchester when I was approached by an employee of the charity business Oxfam. Several hours later, back in my little hovel, there was a knock at the door, and when I answered there stood another employee of the charity business Oxfam.
So, just so they do not need to bother me again, here are 4 good reasons not to give to Oxfam,
1. Only idiots give to the rich. Many Oxfam employees have a vastly greater disposable income than me. Before they give to anybody they are sure to feather their nests first.
2. They take money from governments. Their agenda is dictated by the big bureaucratic interests. They are not independent, rather part of the apparatus of social control.
3. They are racist. They constantly portray Africans as little more than helpless nincompoops, whereas it is Oxfam's masters in government who strive to keep Africa poor.
Also Oxfam are part of the bureaucratic Jew bashing brigade, disguised as anti Israeli, anti Zionism.
4. Their 'charity' is counter productive. It is designed to hide their own selfishness and that of their masters. They promote the lie that 'We' are 'good', helping the helpless. In fact, 'Aid' only drives corruption and leads to dependency. Governments of countries that receive aid feel safe to ignore their populations when services are provided by outsiders. It leaves them free to sell out their countries to foreign governments and multinationals, whilst building up reserves in Swiss bank accounts.

In Power Or In Office?

In a free society, one that is autonomous and self-regulates, governments are 'in office'. Sad to say, in a modern democracy, governments are 'in power'.
Why is that? Why is democracy just a facade for dictatorship?
Fifty years ago we were a free country, more or less. The press was unregulated, you could speak freely, and it was assumed that you were a responsible adult, once you were over the age of eighteen or twenty one. Our freedom was often attributed to the democratic political process, but in fact this was wrong. In England, freedom came with a representative Parliament and a limited government. The totalitarian concept of democracy came more from Europe and America. English liberties were more of a throwback to the Middle Ages, a holdout against the centralizing tendencies of the European despots.
But now, with liberty all but dead, the democratic state sees fit to adjust your behaviour, to monitor your actions, to limit your faith, to define your very concept of what it means to be human. Children are forced to swallow ideologies of self-loathing and degradation in what passes for education, primed for a hopeless future of debt servitude and sterility. The government is not limited, it is in power. Nothing is beyond its remit - sport and culture as well as education and health.
You can vote all you want to - you will always get the boss.

The Butcher Boy

In London City, where I did dwell,
A butcher boy I loved so well,
He courted me my heart away,
And now with me he will not stay.
There is an inn in the same town,
Where my love goes and sits him down
He takes a strange girl on his knee
And tells to her what he didn't tell me.

It's a grief to me; I'll tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I,
But her gold will melt and her silver fly;
In time of need she'll be poor as I
I wish my baby it was born
And smiling on its daddy's knee
And me poor girl to be dead and gone
With the long green grass growing over me.

'Oh, mother, mother, you do not know,
What grief and pain and sorrow and woe -
Go get a chair to sit me down
And a pen and ink to write it down.'
On every line she dropped a tear,
While calling home her Willy dear,
And when her father he came home
He said, 'Where is my daughter gone?'

He went upstairs, the door he broke -
He found her hanging upon a rope -
He took his knife and he cut her down,
And in her breast these lines were found;
'Oh what a silly maid am I!
To hang myself for a butcher boy!
Go dig my grave, both long and deep,
Place a marble stone at my head and feet,
And on my breast a turtle dove
To show the world I died for love.'

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel According To John, Chapter 1, verse 19
'And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?'

One if the peculiarities of this Gospel is that the Jewish establishment and its supporters are referred to as 'the Jews'. Clearly John the Baptist was a Jew, as was John the Evangelist, who wrote this particular Gospel. Indeed, Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary, his friends Martha and Mary, their brother Lazarus, and all the apostles were Jews too.
In the land of Israel, in those days there were two hierarchical power structures, the military power and the ideological, priestly power. The military power was in the hands of the Romans, the priestly power in the hands of a Jewish elite, increasingly accountable to the local powers such as the Herods as well as to the Romans. A gap seems to have sprung up between the collaborationist elite and the people. It comes as no surprise to learn later in the New Testament that Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee, an establishment Jew, a moralist was a Roman citizen, just as nowadays the most moralistic, the most Politically Correct, are establishment radicals, faux revolutionaries, 'party members'.
The Levites and the priests were interested in John, for political correctness was their department. At first sight John the Baptist did not seem to threaten the 'government' the privileges of the overseer class, but you could not be too careful.
Curiously enough modern day Jews, like Reformed Christians, are perceived as a threat to Power, the principalities of this earth. Neither modern Jews, nor true Christians have a religious hierarchy, there are no priests, and so are perceived as a threat to the structures of domination. At heart, both modern Jews and Christians know no Law but the Law of God. Their dual citizenship is something that Caesar is not always prepared to put up with. Around here many churches seem to have replaced the Ten Commandments with the Equality Act of 2010, so Caesar need not worry too much.

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

'The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at  the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all over scored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out , that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs, and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will laugh afterwards...........

For contemporary judgement does not recognise that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation......

And so the money which to some extent may have saved the situation is spent on various means for bringing about self-oblivion.............

For every man there are certain words that are as if closer and more intimate than any others. And often, unexpectedly, in some remote forsaken backwater, some deserted desert, one meets a man whose warming conversation makes you forget the pathlessness of your paths, the homelessness of your nights, and the contemporary world full of people's stupidity, of deceptions for deceiving man. Forever and always an evening spent in this way  will vividly remain with you, and all that was and that took place then will be retained  by the faithful memory: who was there, and who stood where, and what he was holding  - the walls, the corners, and every trifle........

........nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book........

Let me warn you that if you start chasing after views, you'll be left without bread and without views.'

Looking Through The Prism Of Power

The Church Of England has appointed a woman to be the new Bishop of Stockport. This is supposed to be all very cool and Equal, but it is hardly Christian. Christianity is all about service, not power, and the entire State Feminist agenda is all about reinforcing power at the expense of Love. Yet we know that God is Love.
Modern people see hierarchical power as natural. From the moment they go to school, they meet Power in the shape of the teacher. The little children put on a uniform and they learn submission to Power. Such relations of submission carry on throughout adult life. It is pretty much all modern people know. The flip side to the daily humiliation is a kind of nihilistic hedonism. It may be fun for a while but it is not freedom.
Contrary to the modern  experience throughout the ages people experienced Power only marginally, as something intrusive and invasive, hence the special loathing for soldiers  and tax collectors. Most communities consisted of large families and guild, craft, and religious fraternities. Self help and mutual aid, Cooperative societies whether church or lay, were normal in Merry England right up to Lloyd George's People's Budget just over a hundred years ago.
Human reality was seen through the prism of love. The most important work, that of caring for the young and the old, house work and house maintainance, cooking, sewing, washing, growing food was all done unpaid, outside of the formal economy and outside of the power structure.
But now freedom has withered and with it the Christian Churches. It has been a long slow death for many mainstream churches. They betrayed the people, teaching reward and punishment, supporting wars, presenting themselves as part of the apparatus of power.
Christianity sees things through the prism of Love. Nobody in the Church has 'Power'. A minister or a bishop is there to serve God and his congregation. There are many of us who could do a better sermon than many a minister, many who are perhaps kinder or wiser, but that does not mean that we must thrust ourselves forward.
Modern Feminism does not try to abolish the power structures of the present. Equality does not mean the destruction of hierarchy. It is simply a means of dragging women into the same degradation as men. When I deal with women civil servants I am always saddened by their viciousness and their lies, their loyalty to their institution and their careers, the way they turn their backs on me, a poor peasant.
The new Bishop of Stockport is not liberated. Her coat is not the mantel of Love, but the chain mail of power. She is not exalted, she is degraded. Adolfina is dressing in Adolf's clothes.

Aye, We Were 'Appy Then

The Seventies, a decade on trial. If you listen to the indoctrinated youngsters of today we lived in a jungle of wife-beaters, paedophiles, racists, homophobes, and goodness knows what other snakes. The jungle is being cleared, and police posted along the highway, so the darlings need not fear the savage tribes.
Those happy grinning savages of the 1970s look so 'appy in the old films. They were not to know that more serious times were around the corner. Who could have predicted the bitter, swearing twenty-first century? Back then was the golden age of the English working class - inside toilets, double glazing, colour TV, central heating, and foreign holidays! Not all of it for everyone, mind, but enough. And jobs there were a plenty.
 Going round the supermarket today Christmas songs were playing in the background - Boney M, Paul McCartney, Shakin' Stevens, Elton John, John Lennon, Mud, Jona Lewie - music forty years old or more.
It's not like all the customers were alive then. And its the same the rest of the year. Music in public is dominated by the 1970s. Wherever you go you hear the music of that hairy grinning decade when the gap between rich and poor was less than ever before or since. Deference to position and wealth was fast disappearing. Amidst the chaos there was hope. Nowadays there is just resentment, fear, and blame.
Back then lads and lasses, we were 'appy, aye! All that inappropriate touching never did us any harm.

No Room For A Pregnant Woman

The other day the minister made a little point in his sermon about there being no room at the inn for Mary, a pregnant woman. Not only was the inn full up, but nobody was prepared to give up their comfort for a woman who was clearly about to give birth.
Everybody's elbows were so sharp, their minds so focused on their precious selves, that the natural healthy impulse to help had vanished.
Like our sick society, I thought, sick with selfishness and the disease of the 'I'. Like our sick society, the pregnant woman is shunted to one side, out of sight. Here too there is no place for a pregnant woman.
Capitalist society only values monetary power. Fifty years ago men held all the positions of power because they earned the money. Women were second class because, although they worked in the home, bringing up the children, they did not possess the power of money.
But this patriarchal perception of women's lack of worth still has not changed. Women have access to money, careers and power, but only on men's terms. If anything, the woman of the past, she who works for family and home, yet does not work in the power structure, is valued even less now than a hundred years ago.
A woman is only valued when she gives up womanhood.
In our society a pregnant woman is a burden. She has stepped out of line. She has stopped earning money and has reduced her consumption.
Society is no longer matrilocal. Women are no longer sacred. This is the revolution of our time.
A child is now an obstacle to consumption, a lifestyle choice. Having a child is no longer the right of every woman. No longer does man feel the obligation to protect and provide for the mother and the young.
Childbirth has been outsourced. The children of the poor from the neo-colonies are brought in to do the dirty jobs.
There are not enough children of our own to work for us as we grow old. Too many of them have been aborted along the way, to give us time and space to buy our baubles and take our vacations.
Here and now in Merry England there's no room at the inn for a pregnant woman.

From Riches To Rags In Three Generations

As long as we have the bare necessities of life, I'm sure most people would agree that what we really need is love. We need to be surrounded by people who need us and whom we need, who we value and who value us. When we think of materially wealthy countries such as South Korea and Japan and we see the isolation, the millions of people living alone with nothing to nurture except for 'my life' they seem to be desperately poor in human terms, in the things that really matter. And we are heading down the road to nihilism ourselves, here in merry old England.
Less than a hundred years ago most people lived near their relations. Children were brought up not just by their parents but by aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents and whoever else was around. The extended family, the village, the semi-autonomous community swaddled us all in a coat of comfort. We were born as part of a community, and of course, that coat of comfort restricted our self-indulgence.
In the mid twentieth century large amounts of people moved area to further their careers. The extended family was left behind, regarded as archaic and restrictive, and the romantic couple of bourgeois love became the foundation of society, the perfect nuclear family. The sick, the old, the education of the young - the Welfare/Warfare State would care for them. The family was stripped bare and the nuclear family was born, - mum, dad, and 2.4 kids!
The coat of comfort that had swaddled us throughout our lives was replaced by a thin sheet. Uncles, aunties, grandparents, familiar faces and familiar places were replaced by this small gathering, huddled round the television set, backs to the world, doors locked on the unfamiliar hostile winds.
And now, forty years after quickie divorces were introduced marriage has little meaning. The nuclear family has melted down. Now the family means a tired, overworked woman, liberated, yes, from all ties, except perhaps a resented child. She is a woman liberated to cheap labour and consumption. There may be a man, but his status can only be temporary.No longer does he earn a 'man's wage.' The woman has to earn her woman's wage, topped up by government tax credits.
After all, we only work for ourselves in this atomised world, don't we?

Love Is Pleasing

I never thought that my love would leave me
Until that morning when he stepped in
He sat down and I sat beside him
And then our troubles they did begin

Oh love is pleasing and love is teasing
And love is a pleasure when first it's new
But love grows older and grows quite colder
And it fades away like morning dew

There is an alehouse in yon town
And there my love goes and he sits down
He takes a strange girl upon his knee
And tells her what he once told me

I wish my father had never whistled
I wish my mother had never sang
I wish the cradle had never rocked me
I wish I'd died love, when I was young.

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel according to John, Chapter 1, verse 18
'No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.'

No man has ever seen God, except God the Son, the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.
But the Lord 'hath declared him'.
In his words, his teachings, his miracles, above all in his life and his death, Our Lord has declared God. Jesus Christ has revealed to us the Truth of God.
There is no need for further revelation. The prophets of other religions are false prophets.
Jesus Christ is the Truth, and in him we can know God, his love divine, the sacrificial, unlimited, unconditional love that is he creative force of the universe, the Word of Creation, the Light of Life.........and our destiny is to sing the praises of Divine Love for all eternity.

Torture And Sociology

'Progressives', 'Leftists', extreme right wingers to you and me, who support a police state, restrictions to jury trials, secret courts that can deprive you of your children and your liberty, the abolition of double jeopardy, the abolition of Habaes Corpus, the government adjusting the income of those deemed worthy (tax credits),the introduction of Armed Forces Day, the militarization of Remembrance Sunday, restrictions on the press, endless overseas warfare, monitoring of private correspondence, and so on ad infinitum, always claim a moral superiority as they pick up their rather large pay cheques, and draw on their pensions that the poor have to sweat to pay for.
Oh yes, they are the righteous ones. They might send you to jail if you say the wrong things, but that is because you are bad and they are good.
And war, yes war. Well they don't like the Jews, sorry, I mean Israel.
And as for their wars, you know, like bombing Yugoslavia, sanctions on Iraq ( five hundred thousand children was a price worth paying, you know) and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the murder of thousands of Libyans through terrorist bombing, well you know, it's not really something they agree with - and they'll quickly turn the conversation back to the Jews, sorry, the Israelis, or if you're really lucky, about our mission to spread homosexuality throughout the poorer, less civilised races, I mean countries.
And torture - well they don't agree with it. But it was their government, the New Labour Party that was complicit in or participated in torture. They cannot surely be the same people who have brought us sweetness and light and Progress?
They are? Progressives are torturers! The same people who love foxes and badgers and abortion? Blimey, Adolf liked animals too - he just wasn't too good with people. And Uncle Joe? That was just an error. He went off script.
When you replace religion with social science, the love of God with social security, the sanctity of the individual human life with Human Resources, theology with psychology, torture will follow as surely as night follows day.

Rabbi Small Discusses Free Will

In Harry Kemelman's 1978 crime novel 'Thursday The Rabbi Walked Out' his character Rabbi Small talks about free will,
'............The right to choose - '
'Between bread and toast?' the rabbi challenged. 'Between turning right or left at a crossing? The lower animals have that kind of free will. For man, free will means the freedom to choose to do something he knows is wrong, wicked, evil, for some material advantage. But that calls for a fair chance of not being discovered and punished. Would anyone steal if he were surrounded by policemen and certain of arrest and punishment? And on the other hand, what virtue is there in a good deed if the reward is certain? Since God is presumably all-seeing and all-knowing, no transgression goes undetected, and no good deed fails to be noted. So what kind of free will is that? How does it differ from the free will of the laboratory rat that is rewarded by food if he goes down one path of a maze and is given an electric shock if he goes down another?'

Torture - A Bureaucratic Procedure

Torture is  commonplace amongst authoritarian governments but it has been mercifully rare in the Anglo Saxon world. Now we too are torturers.
Of course, individuals can be unspeakably cruel, but torture, like murder, is usually the prerogative of the State and quasi State organisations like the infamous Inquisition.
In England torture was dispensed with when Cromwell defeated the totalitarian Stuarts, a victory for liberty and the rule of law reinforced by the Glorious Revolution, separating us from the Continent where torture and Catholicism were the norm.
For three centuries we took pride in being free and in being civilised ( I know at times we did not live up to it). The English were not enslaved and militarised like the post-Revolutionary French or the Imperial Germans.
And the United States, for all its many faults, maintained the idea that the least government may be the best, that the law is a tool to defend the individual from the government, not a tool of government to conquer the people.
But with the decline of the autonomous family and the concentration of ownership in vast corporations and funds, the hierarchising and centralisation of economic power has led to the bureaucratisation of every day life. Justice has been replaced by population management, a simple function of human resource administration. Torture is the inevitable result of the callousness brought about by the habits of submission and sycophancy encouraged by life on the ladder of hierarchy.

The Left Is The New Far Right

In the not so distant past the Left, in political terms, meant a socialism based on working class power. Obviously this did not always work out in practise, but at least in theory, the Left represented the working class, those who worked manually, not the management nor the owners.
Nowadays the term 'Left' has been expropriated by the management classes to describe their deranged power-crazed attempts at social engineering. Whatever they decide is correct behaviour today is counted as Left or Progressive. In reality it is not the form of social engineering that matters, but the fact of social engineering that matters - that is the exercise of power.
What counts for the Left is the exercise of hierarchical power. It has no intention of sharing that power with its victims, the workers. To maintain its power it casts around for an endless array of scapegoats and bogeymen. There are endless campaigns against the enemy within. Witch hunts, the running down of those who cannot maintain ideological purity is the order of the day.
Despair, blame and hate, fear and anxiety, darkness everywhere.
The Green Party, as mentioned before, are less interested in subsidised solar panels, than blaming the One Per Cent, who apparently rule the world. They talk of corrupt bankers, of Tories, of Thatcher, with a hiss and a hate, these alleged enemies of their bureaucratic distopia. For you see, if debt and poverty stalks the land, if the health service is sick, it is the fault of the evil one per cent. Nobody, but nobody, mentions the doubling of the bureaucracy in the past fifteen years and that the poor must pay for it through debt and taxes.
To the Far Right new Leftist the people can only be passive victims. The people are not dynamic, constructive, resourceful. For them the people are the Indignant, the baying mob, a hate filled rabble wearing Guy Fawkes masks. This scum is not the people, just a bunch of self-pitying losers angry at their own passivity, lashing out to destroy their toys like petulant children.
Real socialists and real anarchists build cooperatives, friendly societies, social organisations of self help and mutual aid.
The bureaucratic hate of the overseer class is a million miles away from peasant and proletarian solidarity. The new Left wants to destroy social solidarity and micro manage your life.
The hierarchy and the hate, the totalitarian micro managing of thought and deed used to go by the name of Fascism, a movement of the Far Right.

Breastfeeding In Public - A Little Respect Please

I venture on to dangerous territory!
Personally, I find the sight of a woman breastfeeding a baby rather charming. Not only do I like women and breasts, but I like babies too!
But I can understand why some folk should prefer not to see a child fed in public. All sorts of people, not just 'bigots', prefer to go about their business undisturbed by feeding. I may be wrong but I don't imagine Moslem women whipping their tits out in front of the men.
Like it or not, sex and reproduction are part and parcel of the same process, and breasts are part of women's reproductive, and therefore sexual, attributes.
Breastfeeding may not involve a man, but it is still a reproductive act.
It is feeding, but it is not the same sort of feeding as munching on a sandwich. Breastfeeding is an intimate private act, an act of love and bonding between mother and child.
It is an action that involves two people only, a private act, not a public act, so ladies, though
 I personally am happy to watch you feed, please, show a little tolerance for those who would like you to respect your own privacy and theirs.

Love Is Teasin'

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
I wish I was a maid again,
But a maid again I will never be
Till apples grow on an ivy tree,

Oh love is pleasin' and love is teasin'
And love is a pleasure when first it's new,
But as it grows older, sure the love grows colder,
And it fades away like the morning dew.

I left my father, I left my mother,
I left all my brothers and sisters too.
I left all my friends and my own relations,
I left them all to follow you.

But the sweetest apple is the soonest rotten,
And the heart of love is the soonest cold,
And what can't be cured love, has to be endured love,
And now I'm bound for America,

And love and porter make a young man older
And love and whiskey make him old and grey,
And what can't be cured love, has to be endured love,
And now I'm bound for America.

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel according to John chapter 1, verse 17.
'For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

This verse sums up what has already been written. Indeed, it more or less sums up the whole Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.
The law was given by Moses, the Law of God, the Law of Love. This great gift lifted mankind out of the rut of superstition and fear, of subservience to kings and idols.
Though following the Law was no guarantee of an easy life, it was clear that blessings flowed to those who honoured God, kept the Sabbath, refrained from greed, slander and so on. The Jews of today will tell you as much.
With the law of God there is no need for a king. God's law trumps all others, much to the annoyance of bureaucracies and tyrants through the ages.
Those who obey the Law have no need to fear the random anger of a king or a nature god, or the displeasure of an idol created from mankind's imagination.
But the Law also condemns us in the eyes of the one perfect Living God. Our sin is only wiped clean by the sacrifice of our Lord, the Lamb of God. This is the grace divine, wondrous and kind, of our God.
And through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ the fullness of God's great love, and his purpose is revealed to us; for us to know his Truth, his perfection, his holiness.

A Load Of Marbles

Who really cares about the Elgin Marbles? Apparently some Greeks take time off from plundering their own country to damn Perfidious Albion for nicking a bit of ancient artwork and not returning it when asked to.
Back in the 1980s Revoltina and I went on a day trip to Athens whilst on holiday nearby. We explored the Acropolis with a group of English sightseers. At one point the guide started berating us for the fact that our government would not return these bloomin' marbles. Revoltina thought the guide had lost hers. I thought the woman was just plain rude.
Then an older guy spoke up, saying that he was fed up with hearing this twaddle, that it had been the British Navy that had secured Greek independence from the Turks at Navarino Bay, that our greatest poet (in his opinion), Lord Byron had laid down his life for the cause of Greek independence. We all applauded him, and the silly woman shut up. Of course, she didn't apologise.
These days there's always some inadequate who will blame their troubles on you. Sadly, in Scotland, where Byron's family originated, the whole place is run by idiot Greek women. They run amok down here too. They're all over the world, the resentful hordes, sneering and hating.
If it wasn't Elgin's Marbles it would be something else.
It's a real drag.

Lionel Blair Has Had Enough

The consumer society consumes itself, collapsing in isolation and paranoia. For many years now the English have collaborated in the destruction of their own society, replacing family and social solidarity with a series of transactions. Even charity is measured in monetary terms. It is reasonable to assume that your neighbour is only out to get what they can. Logically, it is assumed that a relationship with a child, an obstacle to consumption after all, can only be exploitative. I mean it stands for reason.
The veteran entertainer Lionel Blair has had enough of entertaining the sick society. No more pantos for Lionel!
In an interview with the Mirror, he says,
'One of my favourite things in pantomime was getting the kids up on stage with me. With little girls, I'd say, 'Can I have a kiss please? And with the little boys I'd shake hands.........
'There was one little boy who used to come up to me every night to give me a hug and in the end I had to say to the matron, 'I love him but will you please stop him doing that?'  It only takes one stagehand to say, 'Lionel Blair is touching the kids backstage,' and that's your career over. So I had to stop it. It's awful, so sad, because I adore children.......'

Is the Green Party just a tad Nazi?

The Green Party is full of good people, righteous people, moral people, victims who like to hate. Behind the caring façade there is plenty of bile. Some might say their whole agenda is one of life-denial, a gob in the face of every life loving person on the planet. But, perhaps they are just a little bit more aware than the rest of us, and want to save the world we live in. Perhaps.
The Guardian newspaper notes that the Greens have doubled their membership since January. It appears that they have risen to replace the Liberal Democrats, and to be honest, I see little difference in the two parties, or their supporters.
Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Greens in England and Wales says, 'There are many former Labour and LibDem members who are fed up with parties that are happy to see society continue to be run for the benefit of the one per cent and the continued trashing of our natural environment........Some are former Tories horrified by the government's fracking fantasy or worried by its failure to tackle our fraud-ridden, corrupt, reckless financial sector.'
So there we have the basis of the Greens' appeal. The 1 per cent. The socialism of fools, the conspiracy theory, the secret cabal ruling the world - the fraud-ridden, corrupt, reckless financial sector!
We are the victims, they say, wallowing in self-pity, of a small minority running society for its own benefit, at our expense - corrupt, fraudulent, financial.
Who can they be, these spectres of doom, who come to suck our blood while we sleep? What can we do? Seek them out, destroy them and then............

Bigot Of The Day - Lots Of Gambians

Send in the drones armed with those humanitarian bombs, blessed by the Archbishop of Vichy, send in the NGOs, send in the missionaries, send in the clowns! Gambia, a small country hugely endowed with glorious beaches and European sex tourism is full of homophobic thought criminals.
Monday's Daily Observer explains:
'We have said it before and we will say it again. This is a Muslim and Christian country. Both the Holy Quran and the Holy Bible condemn homosexuality just as the scriptures condemn theft, adultery, lying etc. And we do not pass laws to make theft, adultery, lying and other evil deeds acceptable. But we tolerate them. This is because tolerance is a virtue and without tolerance we would have much conflict in society. But we do not want anyone to abuse that tolerance either.
Unfortunately, homosexuals do, by demanding non-homosxuals should accept their lifestyle. Well the lifestyle in The Gambia is one based around Family and Religion. Like God's Adam and Eve, the Family is based around Mother (female), Father (male) and the rest of the extended family. Former British premier Tony Blair's definition of 'marriage' and 'family' as being whatever conjecture (even man and goat!) does not apply in our religious context.
Look, we are not interested in stoning anyone, even homosexuals. What our President is saying, and we agree with him totally as usual in this: Ours is a society guided by religious principles.
These religious principles leaves no room for homosexuality. Sex and marriage in our culture is between man and woman. Sex and marriage between a man and a man, a woman and a woman, is viewed as irreligious and gross by the vast majority of our people here......
So, please respect our religions, cultures and traditions by keeping your homosexuality out of our country. And also respect our values as a sovereign country. Gone are the days of colonialism.'

Four Poor Sad Kiddies

This is taken from a report in the Daily Times of Pakistan, a report about family breakdown in the United Kingdom, a situation they no doubt find sad and barbaric, an affront to civilized values and the human rights of children.

'Four in ten children born in the year 2000 were not living with both parents by the age of eleven. And modern youngsters are four times as likely as those born in the 1960s to experience family collapse, the study reveals.
Researchers blamed the spread of family breakdown on the ease of divorce and the lack of shame felt by couples who separate.
They said youngsters whose mother and father had broken up were far more likely to have behaviour problems.
The state-funded Millennium Cohort Survey of more than thirteen thousand children born around the year 2000 found unmarried parents were responsible for most cases of family breakup.
At the age of eleven, around 92% of children born to married couples were living with both their mother and father. For those with cohabiting parents the proportion was only 55%.........Nearly four in every ten children lived through at least one change in their parents' relationship status in their first eleven years - up from one in ten in 1969.....The study said one in seven had been through more than one family breakup.
Dr. Roxanne Donnelly, the lead author of the report said, 'Some of these parents might have previously stayed together while living in misery, but many might have worked harder on their marriages, instead of giving up more easily, if there was more of a stigma.' The report compared the state of families today and in 1969, when a similar large-scale study was undertaken.
That was the year when major reforms ushered in the era of 'quickie' divorces. Since then, successive governments have removed tax incentives for couples to marry.'

Spancil Hill

Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by,
Me mind being' bent on rambling to Ireland I did fly,
I stepped aboard a vision and followed with my will,
Till next I came to anchor at the cross near Spancil Hill.

Delighted by the novelty, enchanted with the scene,
Where in my early boyhood where often I had been.
I thought I heard a murmur and I think I hear it still,
It's the little stream of water that flows down Spancil Hill.

It being the twenty-third of June, the day before the fair,
When Ireland's sons and daughters in crowds assembled there.
The young, the old, the brave and the bold, they came for sport and kill,
There were jovial conversations at the cross of Spancil Hill.

I paid a flying visit to my first and only love,
She's white as any lily and gentle as a dove.
She threw her arms around me, saying  'Johnny I love you still.'
She's Mag the farmer's daughter and the pride of Spancil Hill.

I dreamt I stooped and kissed her as in the days of yore
She said 'Johnny you're only joking, as many's the time before'
The cock crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill,
And I woke in California, many miles from Spancil Hill.

A Verse On Sunday

'And of his fullness have all we received, and grace for grace.'

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was before John the Baptist, who came after John the Baptist, who is and always will be, has given of his fullness to those who believe.
It is a remarkable thought - that we have received of the fullness of God, of his completeness, his truth, his abundance.
God's love is overflowing. His love is free, unmerited, boundless. Such is the nature of grace, such is the nature of God.
For God's love is giving, selfless and sacrificial. It is the stuff of life. Each time we manipulate our fellows, each time we treat them as a human resource who exists to gratify our appetite, we deny a little of the divine Love.
It is in giving that we live, giving from the abundance that we receive from God, even when that abundance appears to us to be a 'mite'. There is always something we may give, be it ever so small, be it no more than a smile.
We receive so much from the Lord it is good to remember and to be thankful, even when those good times have ended in, perhaps, a sad and terrible way. To be thankful, to smile, to bless, are far far from easy, but it is in giving that we receive.
It is in giving, without the expectation of earthly reward, that we are truly alive.

The Bankers Are Not To Blame

Whilst having lunch with members of my Spanish group, educated, more prosperous people than I, not all working in the state sector, I heard again the view expressed that the bankers are to blame for the financial mess in the Western world, and all the consequences that flow from it. The people who express this view are the same who like to blame Mrs. Thatcher too, for many of our ills.
The main gripe is that the banks were bailed out by the government here in the United Kingdom. Too big to fail, it is said. Fury, resentment - the financial crisis brought on by criminal bankers, who puzzlingly were bailed out by 'our' politicians. No doubt there was corruption, cronyism etc, etc.
Gordon Brown famously announced that he had abolished boom and bust, and sadly many people believe him, blaming criminals for ejecting us from the very Eden created by Gordon the Good.
In reality, the story is a little different. There may well have been skulduggery, and the ethics of the financial markets and, indeed, society itself may have nose dived in the past century, and no doubt the regulatory system was open to abuse.
However, the underlying cause is simply a normal business cycle. Capital moves into unproductive areas, e.g. housing or tulips, - a bubble is created, a crash ensues and capital is reallocated - 'real' capital survives, 'ficticious' capital is pared or eliminated.
 I had to agree with my liberal friends that the banks should have been allowed to fail. But they had not thought through the consequences, nor thought through, in a rigourous, non conspiratorial way the reasons for the bail out.
The consequence of allowing the banks to fail would have been high interest rates. Lending would still have been available for small and medium businesses, house prices would have crashed to an affordable level, causing pain to existing mortgage holders, and the after a year or two the adjustment would have been accomplished and 'real' growth would have resumed.
However, this did not happen, because there was one beast simply too big to fail - the government. The government was - and is now even more - in debt. High interest rates would have caused a government default. It would have been the end of the New Labour social and political revolution, a revolution created by indebtedness, and maintained by indebtedness by the New Conservatives.
Without the bailout, millions of parasites, the very people who blame the bankers, would have lost their incomes and their pensions.
To maintain their privilege it was necessary for the bureaucrats to keep interest rates low and to bleed the productive population over a period of years. Labour costs of the subject population are to be kept as low as possible. The third world is imported to drive down wages and to do the dirty jobs - nothing benevolent about that.
No, the bailout, the continued financial crisis has nothing to do the normal economic cycle, little to do with the wicked bankers. What turned a downturn into a catastrophe was the government and the political imperative of saving the Welfare Warfare state.

Bigot Of The Day - Ridley Scott

Today, the very first Bigot of the Day, is honoured by the famous film director Ridley Scott.
Mr. Scott has been making a film all about Moses, and the main characters are  catagorized as being 'white.'
This may not come as too big a surprise to some of us, as the film is being made in North America and the other major market is likely to be the European colonies, areas with a  large  pinky pale population.
The audience generally likes to identify with the heroes portrayed in films, as they similarly like to identify with sportsmen. We like to think that heroes are sort of like us, could even be us at a stretch of the imagination, which is why few kids identify with Wayne Rooney.
I suppose that were the film made in Bollywood the main actors would be South Asian and were it made in Nollywood the main actors would be African. Should I be offended were that the case? I think not.
Apparently Mr. Scott does include some darkish brown characters - as servants and thieves! Since American prisons are choc-a-bloc with darkish brown people and 'black' people continue to clean the toilets of the 'white' folk, then I must assume that Mr. Scott is just reflecting the reality of Equality.

Spanish Lessons - Feeling Awkward

I've been having a few Spanish lessons at the Instituto Cervantes, and when I go there I feel like I'm entering enemy territory. This isn't because of the Spanish people, who are fine, if generally lacking a little style. It's something to do with the Instituto itself  and something to do with the pupils, who are mainly retired bureaucrats, at least in the morning classes.
The Instituto itself is well into Equality, as is the political establishment in Spain. The library has an LGTB section, needless to say.
Pupils and staff sing from the same statist hymn book. I get particularly irritated when rich functionaries tell you that zoos are cruel to animals or that going out socialising may not be good for your health.
Frankly, most of them are moralistic, scrounging Fascists. Of course, they go camping and hiking, they love to travel, the whole world is their spectacle, belonging as they do to the resentful, hateful, middle. Their own pensions are well protected, you can be sure.
Meanwhile, the workers keep on working.
For all the Equality there aren't many 'workers' taking Spanish classes. There are, you see, different kinds of equality.
It's really not very much fun. They are the same sort of people you see in the Church of England or on a Gender Studies course -bigoted, prejudiced, condemning.
It's not very much fun, having to be earnestly hateful, I'm sure, and its hard to laugh when you are double checking for offensiveness.
Strangely enough, I never see any 'black' people there, except for the two women who clean the white folks' toilets. But that is the wonder of Equality.

Official - Women Are Inferior

I have always thought that women were equal to men in the sight of the Law and the sight of God, but according to Ruling Party I am wrong. I am a little bit afraid, of course, because disagreeing with the Orthodoxy can get you into trouble.
Perhaps I've had a sheltered life, but most of the women I know are strong characters who instinctively know how to dominate creatures larger and more stupid than them, be they horses, dogs or men. As for men, I have met a few peasants who have bought into the bourgeois glorification of violence, but they are a small minority. Most guys just want a pleasant life, a bit of love, some money in their pocket, some children they can be proud of. Maybe they want to achieve, but most of them are not competitive, except for fun. Certainly they do not compete in the back stabbing bureaucratic way, scrambling up the ladder of the hierarchy, kicking away the dead you leave behind. No, violence is almost exclusively the domain of those who have been corrupted by giving and receiving orders.
Yet, those bureaucrats who fear the free peasantry, try to transfer their own guilt upon our heads.
There is to be a new law about domestic violence. Why there should be any laws on domestic violence beats me. After all, if one human being attacks another it is a crime. Often, if it an isolated incident, when tempers are inflamed, it can be sorted out, but should the violence be systematic or serious, then the village needs to step in.
These days our violence has been expropriated by the State, and it is the State that acts against the wrongdoer. The State acts in its function as a protection racket.
The new domestic violence law is being brought in to outlaw 'psychological' and 'emotional' abuse. Does that mean that I can have Revoltina arrested for telling me I'm sick, or sneering at me in front of my friends, or for spending all our money on fags and booze?
No, of course not! I am a man, so I am a criminal, not a victim. Revoltina is a victim, not a criminal. According to the Law she is precious, fragile, hopeless and helpless, who has moved from her father's protection to her husband's protection and now is protected  by the State. She might sneer at me, but she must love, honour and obey Caesar all her life. Never, ever will she be a grown up. She is just a silly little thing fit for menial work and shopping. Should she forget the morning after pill, the school and the social worker will help her bring up the fruit of her lust.
Yes, from now on, having given up patrolling the streets, Plod will be patrolling your bedroom. He will be watching in case you you are ungallant, he will listen sympathetically if she wants you removed from the marital home. How can such a law possibly be policed? Cameras and sound recorders in every room? It's coming your way soon.

A Flexible Minimum Income

I was reading an interview with Pablo Iglesias, the 'caudillo' of the Spanish political group Podemos, which means We Can, in which he was talking about a minimum and a maximum income set by the State. Apart from the obvious flaws that more State means more bureaucracy, more police, more prisons, the idea was interesting in that Iglesias called for a flexible minimum wage. To the elderly this might suggest a return to Rationing. The minimum wage would vary according to how you were catagorized, and thus how worthy you were considered by the Powerful. Perhaps there would be no need for prison - they could just starve you instead.
Iglesias explained that, for instance, a young man of twenty would not get so much money as a woman responsible for three other people. The idea of this poor burdened woman interested me. There was no man to share her burden, no indication who these three dependents might be. I suspect one might be a sort of sperm donor or entertainer. Here we have, I thought, the new Totalitarian Family under the tutelage of the State.
Stage One - the traditional Christian peasant family - men and women help each other, caring for the young and the old, each with some responsibility, a reliance of mutual support and the free gift of time and money.
Stage Two - the Liberal/Progressive/Jacobin family with a Paterfamilias in direct hierarchical descent from the Nation State. God is replaced by the government, service replaced by domination. The father, who has probably performed military service or been brutalized by school, lords it over his wife and family.
Stage Three -  the Totalitarian Family under direct surveillance of the State. No autonomous action is allowed. All personal and social actions are regulated. The paterfamilias is dispensed with, left to cruise gambling and pornography sites, a semi criminal figure, stewing in the shadows of his bedsit.   All morals, all finances, are under State control. Men and women are isolated. There is no love, no service, no giving - no life as our ancestors would have understood it - only loneliness, depression and self-pity.

The Ould Orange Flute

In the County Tyrone near the town of Dungannon,
Where many's a ruction myself had a hand in,
Bob Williamson lived a weaver by trade,
And as all of us thought him a stout Orange Blade,
On the twelfth of July as it yearly did come,
Bob played on the flute to the sound of the drum,
You may talk of your harp, your piano or lute,
But there's nothing could sound like the ould Orange flute.

But this treacherous scoundrel, he took us all in,
For he married a Papish named Bridget McGinn,
Turned Popish himself and forsook the oul' cause
That gave us our freedom, religion and laws,
The boys in the town land made some noise upon it,
And Bob had to fly to the Province of Connaught;
He fled with his wife, and his fixings to boot,
And along with all others the ould orange flute.

At Mass every Sunday to atone for his past deeds,
He said Paters and Aves and counted his glass beads.
Till after some time, at the Priest's own desire,
He went with his ould flute to play in the choir.
He went with his ould flute to play in the Mass,
And the instrument shivered and sighed and said, 'Oh, alas'
As he blew it and fingered it made a strange noise,
For the flute would play only 'The Protestant Boys.'

Bob started and jumped and he got in a splutter,
And he threw his ould flute in the blessed holy water,
For he thought that this charm would bring some other sound,
When he played it again it played 'Croppies lie down,'
And all he could whistle and finger and blow
To play Popish music, he found it no go;
'Kick the Pope' and 'Boyne Water' and such like 'twould sound,
But one Popish squeak in it could not be found.

At the Council of Priests which was held the next day,
They decided to banish the ould flute away,
For they couldn't knock heresy out of its head,
So they bought Bob another to play in its stead,
So the flute was condemned and its fate was pathetic,
It was fastened and burned at the stake as heretic,
 As the flames rose around it they heard a strange noise,
'Twas the ould flute still whistling 'The Protestant Boys'.

A Verse On Sunday

John 1.15

'John bare witness of him and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spoke, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.'

John the Baptist was clearly a well known local prophet, whilst Jesus was still little known. When it was time for his ministry, Jesus was proclaimed by John the Baptist.
What was so important about the baptism administered by John?
Before we can receive forgiveness we need to repent. Before we can see our Redeemer we need to acknowledge our slavery to sin.
When talking to non Christians, behind all the guff of fairy tales and misconceptions is an unwillingness to admit fault, to acknowledge servitude to sin. They like to think they are 'good', or at least more good than bad. Even Christians often refuse to admit their inherent bent towards sin, and seem to think they start with a clean slate and just made a few wrong choices. Yet this smugness about one's own virtue means that when things go wrong, then the only ones to blame are the Other. Down this road lies dictatorship, torture, death camps - the principalities of this world.
Before we can know Our Lord as our Saviour we need to repent of our sin. John the Baptist was washing away the sins of his followers in preparation for the coming of the Lamb of God, and the Kingdom of Heaven, when a free people, free from sin and superstition, united in love, not domination, revering God, receiving his unending love, would receive grace after grace, and live fully, eternally, in God's presence.

Walter Ullmann - Popular Self-Government

From Walter Ullmann's book A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages;

'And yet, if a closer study were to be made of the 'ordinary' way of life of the 'lower' sections of the populace, it would be found that they acted very much on the ascending principles of government, which, from a universal-historical standpoint, seems to be more germane, if also not more natural, to the unsophisticated than the highly complex and intellectual descending theory of government.'

'.......these numberless associations, unions, fraternities, communities, colleges, and so on, appeared as the answer to a natural urge of men to combine themselves into larger units. They pursued, partly, aims of self-preservation, partly, what would nowadays be called mutual insurances, partly, sectional interests - but, whatever their aim, the unions provided, so to speak, a shelter for the individual.But the organisation and structure of  these  associations was based on the ascending theory of government: it was they, the members themselves, who managed their own affairs without any direction 'from above': times of ploughing, harvesting, and fallowing were fixed by the village community itself, which also arranged for the policing of the fields. Water supply, utilization of  pastoral lands, the use to be made of rivers, wells, brooks, etc., compensation for damage to crops by cattle or fire, for damage to woods by unlicenced timbering, and so on, were subjects of regulations made by the community itself. The same applied to quarries, smithies, tileries, potteries, where working conditions were fixed. The mechanics by which the 'officers' of the village community came to be created were simple enough, and yet, incontrovertibly, proved the ever active urge to self-government.'

Domestic Violence And NATO

Mary Malone writes:
I don't know anyone who approves of domestic violence, yet it happens and always will happen. Undoubtedly, in societies like our own where militarism and hierarchy are glorified, and women objectified, the problem is going to be greater than in more 'primitive' societies, or working class and peasant communities where society is largely horizontal and reciprocal in nature.
Domestic violence is not the same as occasional violent spats, fights, arguments which  are, sad to say, part of the reality of our lives. We do not always behave with perfect equilibrium. Domestic violence is more to do with control, than simply the odd fight. An abusive partner seeks control - to inflate her or his own worth at the expensive of a partner who is belittled and isolated. If your partner trashes your friends, you can be sure s/he wants to control you. Likewise, if they try to egg you on in any dispute with your family you know that something is amiss.
Whether all this is a matter for the police is a different matter. A report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary seems to suggest that the police should do more. Apparently, the police receive a million calls related to domestic violence each year! There must be some neighbours who report abuse to the authorities every time they hear a raised voice! We know that there is a certain sort of busy-body addicted to denunciations. They are the life-blood of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and child abuse professionals, as they were the life-blood of the Gestapo.
Unless serious physical damage is caused, 'domestic violence' should not be a police matter. Within all relationships there is a great deal of manipulation. If this manipulation turns to intimidation the answer is to move out, to call on friends and society for support.
 People in England expect the State to look after them in old age and in sickness, in education and child crare, but the State cannot replace society in every instance.
We must reject the ever expanding reach of the State into our lives. It is the nature of the capitalist State to ever extend its power, to create new business for itself. It's foreign policy of NATO expansion in eastern Europe is part of the same impulse of hierarchical bureaucratic power that makes it wish to extend its influence into the most personal aspects of our previously private lives under the guise of policing 'abuse'.

The Bombing Of Yugoslavia

This Monday just gone marked the fifteenth anniversary of the beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Against the wishes of the United Nations, NATO air forces bombed Yugoslavia, in what was a war crime, as yet unpunished and never likely to be punished. The excuse for this expansion of NATO power was the old one of human rights and humanitarian intervention. The consequence was the establishment in Kosovo of a narco-mafia state and an enormous United States military base.
Bombs were dropped, sowing the land with depleted uranium. Cluster bombs were dropped causing their victims death if they were lucky, horrific injuries if not.
In reality, the bombing of Yugoslavia was small stuff compared to the later terrorist bombings of Iraq and Libya, but for the terrorists a precedent was set, the bombers got away with their crimes, and a new era of aggressive militarist expansion was set in place, as the Empire of Bases expanded while the West declined, sunk in decadence and debt.
Here is a list taken from a BBC report of 1st June 1999, entitled 'NATO's bombing blunders.'
5th April: homes hit in the mining town of Aleksinac.
12th April: train destroyed near Leskovak.
14th April: refugees bombed in Kosovo.
27th April: civilian homes struck in Surdulica.
28th April: Sofia hit - stray bomb on Bulgarian capital.
1st May: bus bombing at Luzane bridge, Pristina.
6th May: cluster bomb hits Nis - hospital and market bombed.
7th May: Chinese embassy hit in Belgrade.
13th May: Kosovo village bombed, children, homes and tractors mangled and destroyed.
19th May: Belgrade hospital struck.
30th May: civilians die on the bridge at Varvian, Serbia.
31st May: Apartment block struck at Novo Pazar.

Later on relatives of 50 Italian soldiers claimed that they had died as a result of exposure to depleted uranium.

No doubt Madeleine Albright thought it was a price worth paying for the expansion of NATO power.

Testing

John Ball writes:
How many times have we all heard that sorry excuse for lazy agnosticism, 'I'd like to believe, but how can God allow so many horrible things to happen?' That's what they always say, those who wish to remain sunk in egotism.
There is the mirror image - Christians who tell you that God has done such and such for them, as if God never allows horrible things to happen to his people. Well, look at Job! Look at Jesus Christ himself. They tell you that God has a plan for us - well, if includes martyrdom, mutilation or brain damage I'd rather not know, thank you very much.
The third temptation when the devil taunted Jesus in the wilderness went along these lines; do something selfish, self centred, stupid and destructive and God will make sure that no harm will come to you.
This is the third temptation; after material well being, then power, we have the idolatry of the self.
It is the easiest of all the temptations to slip into, to believe that God is here to do our will, that the purpose of God is man, that the Creator must serve his creation.
But worship is the antithesis of self. Though we express our love for God through service  to others, serving people is not the purpose of God.

The Motor Car And The War Against The Young

From my humble fourteenth century point of view, two of the the most astonishing things about your twentieth century existence (to call it a life, you would have to live a bit first), are the motor car and your enmity towards the young.
Children, as you call them, are prohibited from so doing so much, incarcerated as they are most of the day in their day prisons.They are not even allowed to work. No wonder they feel so unnecessary!
When I were a lad, if we weren't doing a few chores for our mam, we were outside playing. Playing out was the greatest treat of all. When you're little the world is so full of marvels. All the boys and girls played out, though it is true that the girls liked to stay at home closer to their mothers, helping with the sowing and the cooking and combing their hair and playing with their rag dolls.
These days it is almost heretical to say that little girls actually like being - well - girls, that really they prefer dancing to playing rugby (me too), but that is another matter.
It is the motor car that has really killed childhood. Kids don't even walk to day prison. They are taken everywhere by the motor car. And if they decide to walk or to play out, the motor car will come and mow them down.
Of course, cars are useful, but just think of the expense! Not only is there the initial cost of buying the damned thing, then there is the tax, the insurance, the maintenance.
It sets us 'free', the motor car. If, on a whim, we decide to travel fifty miles we can do so. Everywhere is near, yet what was once near is now nowhere to be seen. In the streets where people once walked and talked and the children played there is now a desert. Children stay indoors, confined to their home like a Moslem woman. They cannot simply walk down the street to meet their friends. Old people, as they begin to lose the plot, are in great danger. They too are imprisoned for their own safety.
If modern children do not grow up to be drug addled psychopaths it is truly amazing. Once upon a time the child would wonder and roam, exploring the fields and the ponds, the highways and the byways. The childhood of the past was a world of wonders. Modern childhood is a drab existence where little limbs and lungs are rarely exercised, confined to the four walls of the bedroom, the screen of the computer or the television.
Playing out is replaced by some supervised activity, organised, regimented by some depressing grown up.
What a joy it was back then to play out! To play out all day and to come back covered in bruises and scratches. What adventures we had back then in those primitive times!
But you who prefer things to freedom, have put an end to all that.

William Shakespeare - When Daffodils Begin To Peer

From 'The Winter's Tale':

When daffodils begin to peer -
With heigh! the doxy over the dale -
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year,
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge -
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing! -
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge,
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

The lark, that tirra-lyra chants -
With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay -
Are summer songs for me and my aunts,
While we lie tumbling in the hay.

A Verse On Sunday

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, (and we beheld the glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.'

 God has taken on human form and lives amongst us, the Creator and his creation reconciled. John the Evangelist says that 'we' beheld his glory. The 'we' are the sons of God, given the eyesight to behold the glory of the Word made flesh. The Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, is the only begotten of the Father. Jesus Christ is of the essence of the Father - under his authority but equal, - like a human child is equal to its parents, yet subject to its parents' authority. He is begotten, not created - a very important thing to remember, the only begotten Son of God. He is divine through and through.
And for a brief few years Jesus 'dwelt among us.' He lived, suffered, loved as one of us. He never succumbed to sin, yet he knew temptation. He could not sin, for God cannot sin. It is God's nature to be full of Truth.
And grace too - God's irrevocable love for us, freely given, undeserved, unconditional and eternal.

Walter Ullmann - Kings By The Grace Of God

From Walter Ullmann's 'History Of Political Thought - The Middle Ages'

'As a matter of fact, the visible result of the change from the earlier ascending theory of government to its descending counterpart can be found, as far as records show, amongst the Lombards in Northern Italy. The Lombard kings began from the late sixth century on to call themselves 'King by the grace of God' - the Rex Dei gratia' - and there is additional proof that the Anglo- Saxon kings in the seventh century had become familiar with the thesis of the king deriving his power from God and that kingship was conceived as a gift of God. From the eighth century onwards this designation became the standard with all kings of Western and Southern Europe. The meaning of this appellation seems clear enough. The king, who had hitherto been elected by the people or by its representative body, made it abundantly plain by this designation, that his kingship rested upon the good will, the favour, the 'grace' bestowed on him by God. The essential point is that thereby the close links which he had had with the people were severed, because the people conferred no power on him, could not therefore take it away by legal means, and was merely committed to him.'

'The law was given to the subjects or the people, not made by them. It is therefore understandable why law from the eighth century onwards became overwhelmingly royal law, and why this ousted the hitherto prevailing folk-law, the mainly customary law made by the folk (the people). Similarly, until the ascending thesis gave way to its counterpart, there also prevailed in the kingdom the peace guaranteed by the people itself - the so-called Volksfriede - which, on the application of the descending form of government gave way to peace guaranteed by the king (so-called  Koenigsfriede).'

'In the eighth century the king effectively emancipated himself from the fetters that had bound his ancestors to the people: he visibly detached himself from the people. It was a veritable reversal of things.'

Loving The Boss

Mary Malone writes:
One of the key functions of State Feminism is to present the current economic and political oppression in a good light.
Women's liberation, farcically called 'emancipation', an insult to the millions of people enslaved throughout history, even today in some Moslem countries, is presented as integration into the system of reward and punishment, of buy and sell, of working for the boss, of living for the boss.
For almost the entirety of human existence, only slaves worked for a boss. To be free meant to be autonomous, and for the vast majority of women work has always been free and independent.
In the first half of the the twentieth century, women's exclusion from many parts of the Economy was a problem for those in Power. Obviously, if a woman were at home looking after her children and her husband she could not be earning money and contributing tax. If she were preparing the food, making clothes, what good was that to the Powerful? She paid no taxes, so was useless to their Power.
So, women's essential work was denigrated, and the surplus value work of men was exalted.
The welfare state was introduced to destroy the Christian ethic and the mutual support of genuine communities, to take away a large part of the purpose of women's society.
Convenience foods and home appliances meant that women could earn and spend, running ever faster, like rats on a wheel, but vitally, most importantly, contributing taxation to Power.
Marriage was delayed, children aborted, debt encouraged at every turn, as like cows shepherded by the sheep bitches of State Feminism women were corralled into offices and factories throughout the land.
And the little children? Other women looked after the children, paid by the wages of the waged - more taxation, more Power.
And if the women were too exhausted to breed there was always plenty of cheap labour from the Third World.
This is the reality - loneliness, empty lives, debt, drugs, childlessness, toys - this is the State Feminist nightmare.
Men have always known that working for the boss is a humiliation. They will retire or work independently whenever the opportunity arrives.
But the State Feminist woman is the most degraded creature on the planet; a bully, a sycophant, a worm who will sell her birthright for a smiley face and a few toys.

Marriage And The State

John Ball writes:
After much baloney and quite some acrimony, at last some politicians have made some sensible proposals about gay marriage and marriage in general. Both the Liberal Democrats and the United Kingdom Independence Party have suggested that in the matter of matrimony Church and State are divorced.
There was a time, not so long ago, when this country identified itself as a Christian country, more specifically a Protestant country, but this is no longer the case. Whereas fifty years ago marriage and a church wedding went together like a horse and carriage this is no longer the case. Huge amounts of people undergo no wedding, content to live as common law spouses. Most of those who marry officially do not get married in church. Not only do we now have an indigenous population that is largely agnostic, but we have a large population of English people who are Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, and many others.
Added to this mix we have the perfectly sensible introduction of civil partnerships where same sex couples can enjoy the same legal protections as heterosexual couples.
In reality, a civil wedding, a State wedding, is the same as a civil partnership.
Marriage is about making a public commitment, a declaration in the eyes of the community. Legal rights are a different matter.
So, for instance, a Moslem, or a South African traditionalist, may wish to be polygamous. In the eyes of the community to which he belongs, he wishes that four different women are acknowledged to be his wife, and they are happy with this arrangement, then who is to say that they are not married? Clearly, in law the state may only recognise one partner, but this might change in the future.
 A Christian marriage is a matter for the Church, not the State. A couple could chose to marry in the eyes of Church, but not sign up to the State version, though the State version is  only a declaration for legal purposes - next of kin, responsibility for children etc.
Hopefully, it would put an end to all the silly threats of persecutions of individuals who freely gather to share their faith, in the name of the Moloch of Equality.

We All Paid The Price

John Ball writes:
Many years ago, during the Peasants Revolt, many wanted to reform the State, though some of us wanted to destroy it altogether. Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and many others could not believe that young King Richard would harm us. They said that he was surrounded by bad men, such as Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, and that once the King was released from the influence of evil advisers, then we would be happy under the rule of a benign king.
Of course, they were wrong. They were naive and foolish, and we all paid a heavy price for their misplaced trust.
I, myself, knew all along that they were wrong. In Luke's gospel, the devil tempts Jesus with earthly power, proclaiming the kingdoms of the earth to be in his, the devil's, domain.
 Yet, even these days, after a twentieth century in which the State murdered more people than ever before, people still prefer to believe that the State is good.
Yet, behind every act, the State threatens or commits violence.
With every act the State takes away your and my autonomy.
Yet, most people believe that if they vote in a 'democratic' election, then somehow it will be different. But it isn't.
The believers in the idol of the State tell you that the State provides health care, education, jobs and prosperity. But what sort of drug addled health does it provide, this murderous idol? What sort of education does it give, churning out masses of passive unskilled brainwashed consumers? What sort of jobs do you have - dull, repetitive, soul destroying, functional? And you call it prosperity when you don't even have time to think?
The State takes your taxes, that is your time and your labour. It takes you and your effort and moulds you as it wishes. And you thank it, and you want more of it.
The Welfare State does not educate, it does not provide health, and it does not provide a safety net. Instead it destroys society, friendship, mutual support. It diminishes you because it teaches you to think only for yourself.
You support equality, yet the more they preach equality to you, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, reflecting the reality of power, not the illusion of your lazy false democracy.
Democratic, equal, but certainly not free. Bound in mental slavery, crushed by debt servitude, conscripts of wage slavery, your children aborted or stupified by TV and drugs and state education, you think Cameron or Blair is the problem.
The Welfare State, the caring State, the benign, benevolent State, is just a mask that hides unbridled robbery and murder.
Yes, many years ago, Wat and Jack believed that the problem was the King's ministers and we all paid the price.

Today Ukraine, Tomorrow UK?

The people of the Ukraine obviously got it wrong when they voted for a government that preferred friendship with the Russian Federation to friendship with the European Union. Their democratic decision was not respected.
The people of the Crimea have voted overwhelmingly to cut their ties with the Ukraine and resume its historic ties to Russia. This vote conveniently for Russia, and inconveniently for the NATO alliance, allows Russia to keep its warm water naval base in the Crimea.
At the same time the United Kingdom government is bending over backwards to keep Scotland as part of the Union, being prepared to maximise devolution to maintain a political union about which neither Scots, nor English, nor Welsh, nor Irish are especially enthusiastic.
The political class wants the union for military reasons.
The question is: would Scotland be allowed to secede from the Union?
Likewise, if the United Kingdom held a referendum concerning a withdrawal from the European Union, and the electorate unwisely voted to keep Europe at arms length, would the vote be respected?
These days, since the Iraq fiasco, direct invasion has lost popularity with our masters. The number of armed forces personnel is being cut in both the UK and the USA. It is much easier to contract out violence to (paid) fanatics and mercenaries. We have seen how this has worked in the destabilisation and destruction of Syria (host to Russia's only Mediterranean naval base).
Indeed, the NATO - AlQaeda alliance is well cemented, having being forged in Afghanistan against the Russians, and continued with degrees of success in Chechnya, Bosnia, Libya, and today in Syria and Iraq.
The use of violent authoritarian racists in the Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected government is a new twist.
Indeed, if NATO and the European Union wished to bring a rebellious Scotland, or an isolationist England to heal, who would they arm first, their jihadi clients amongst the Sunni fifth column, or a pseudo racist group amongst the indigenous population, created to destabilise, punish and control?
Should the population persist in voting the wrong way, we can be sure that the political class would let us understand the consequences before too long.

Robert Service - Equality

The Elders of the Tribe were grouped
And squatted in the Council Cave;
They seemed to be extremely pooped,
And some were grim, but all were grave:
The subject of their big To-do
Was axeman Chow, the son of Choo.

Then up spoke Tribal Wiseman Waw:
'Brothers, today I talk to grieve:
As an upholder of the Law
You know how deeply we believe
In Liberty, Fraternity,
And likewise in Equality.

'A chipper of the flint am I;
I make the weapons that you use,
And though to hunt I never try,
To bow to hunters I refuse:
But stalwart Chow, the son of Choo
Is equal to us any two.

'He is the warrior supreme,
The Super-caveman, one might say;
The pride of youth, the maiden's dream,
And in the chase the first to slay.
Where we are stunted he is tall:
In short, a menace to us all.

'He struts with throwing stone and spear;
And is not the first to wear
Around his waist and bully leer
The pelt of wolf and baby bear!
Admitting that he made the kill,
Why should he so exploit his skill?

'Comrades, grave counsel we must take,
And as he struts with jest and jibe,
Let us act swiftly lest he make
Himself Dictator of our Tribe:
The Gods have built him on their plan:
Let us reduce him to a man.'

And so they seized him in the night,
And on the sacrificial stone
The axe-men of the Tribe did smite,
Until one limb he ceased to own.
There! They had equalised the odds,
Foiling unfairness of the Gods.

So Chow has lost his throwing arm,
And goes around like every one;
No longer does he threaten harm,
And tribal justice has been done.
For men are equal, let us seek
To grade the Strong down to the weak.

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 13.
'Which were born not of blood, nor by the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.'

The sons of God, those who 'believed on his name', those who 'received him,' those to whom he gave 'power to become the sons of God,' when they came into the world as wee cute babies, were not born the sons of God.
Many wishful thinkers like to believe that God resides in all of us, that all of us are chosen by God. There are others who like to claim the credit for their faith, that they themselves are responsible for their faith, poor frail creatures that they are, that they made a decision to accept the Almighty.
Yet the new Israel, like the old Israel, are a chosen people.
A Christian is no more active in his birth in Christ than new born babies are active in their emergence from their mothers' wombs.
The sons of God are not born 'of blood', nor 'of the will of the flesh,' nor 'of the will of man', but solely, wholly, completely of the will of God.
The heathen enjoys the Common Grace of all Adam's descendants, - the joys of the world, its beauty, its love and laughter, the pleasure in creativity and prosperity - as well as the fruit of Common Sin, but the heathen lives absorbed in himself, above him only sky, and when his hour comes, he will suffer eternal death.
But the sons of God praise the Lord in this world, and bask in  his eternal truth, and will do so forever more, sons of the Eternal,  sons of God, elect, born of the will of God.

Phaedra's Lament

Phaedra was the daughter of Pasiphae and Minos. Her half-brother was the Minotaur, as her mother had procreated with the Great Bull. Phaedra too was a passionate lady, and  had an enthusiasm for her stepson, Hippolytus. The French playwright, Racine, wrote a famous play about her, a play that Proust loved hugely. Phaedra also finds her way into Francesco Cilea's wonderful opera, Adriana Lecouvrier.
Here, from the English version of the libretto is Phaedra's Lament.

'Just Heavens!
What have I done today?

My husband comes,
With him his son: and I shall see the witness
Of my adulterous flame watch with what face
I greet his father, while my heart is big
With sighs he scorned, and tears that could not move him
Moisten mine eyes.

Thank you that his respect
For Theseus will induce him to conceal
My madness, nor disgrace his sire and king?

Will he be able to keep back the horror
He has for me? His silence would be in vain.
I know my treason, and I lack the boldness

Of those abandoned women who can taste
Tranquility in crime, and show a forehead.

English - The Language Of Liberty

The Third Man writes:
Here in Vienna, which is one of the major crossroads of Europe, a capital city that is near the borders of several different European countries, many people speak
 English, not just local Viennese, but Germans, and Slavs and Turks and whoever.
It is easy to put this use of English as a lingua franca down to the power of the Anglo Saxons, particularly the United States, but I prefer to see English as a language of choice, not one of necessity.
English is not German and it is not Russian. Too many people in these parts have known the tyrrany of German and Russian masters.
England and, more particularly the United States, represent freedom and democracy.
What does freedom mean? It means that we are all equal before the law. It means that there is no lord or lady, no duke or count, no commissar, no party member who can tell you what to do, who can demand your passport, and to direct you to live in such and such a town, wear these and those clothes, do this or that job, believe one thing, pray to their idol.
This is what freedom means, and this is what America, and the culture of the English language means.
Many Scots may wish to live in a politically correct bureaucratic hell hole and to drag England with it, and there are serious threats to liberty in both America and England, but for the rest of the world, subjected for centuries to the whim of command, they love to speak English, the language of liberty.

Not In My Back Yard

Dick is always grumbling about all the immigrants in our little town, and indeed, for some people who live in areas that have been overrun by people of other cultures immigration is undoubtedly a bad thing.
It is all about numbers and the concentration of numbers. As an ethnic Englishman I don't particularly want to live in an area of what until recently counted as England, with a bunch of Italians or Russians or Japanese.
But, of course, I do like the easy travel and the chance to live in some exotic location. That is surely a good thing. Just this pat few weeks I have met Bulgarians, Turks, Irish, Albanians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, and Israelis.
This is very cool.
Not so long ago a culture was largely confined to a particular area, but not so these days. Culture adapts and grows or it stays the same and dies.
No, I don't want to live in a neighbourhood of foreigners either. I like to travel to meet the alien. But travel is getting easier and will continue to do so. And with the internet we can keep in touch with others around the globe.
For all the parochialism of nationalists in Scotland, Catalonia, and elsewhere, the day of the nation state is going fast.
We are returning to the era of vast empires with local administrations.
So welcome the foreigner in your midst, because one day you might want to be one too.

Bread Of Heaven

John Ball writes:
During the season of Lent we are often reminded of Jesus's temptations at the hands of the Devil when he spent forty days in the wilderness without food.
It was when Jesus was at his weakest that the Devil came to him.
When Esau was tired and hungry he gave up his birthright for a bowl of food, his birthright being the love of God.
But when Jesus was tempted by the Devil, Jesus responded that man does not live by bread alone. Yes, we need physical bread , but we live, truly live, as sons of God, and not monkeys that see no further than their appetites, by eating the bread of heaven.
Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness. Most of us never get, nor make the opportunity to drop out of society for forty days, but we can contemplate God in our quieter moments.
Jesus did not go into the desert for his own benefit, but to give glory to God. Unlike the Buddhist or the moralist his mind was not turned in on himself.
 When we contemplate God, the living God, the God of love, then we give glory to him, and by doing so we claim our birthright of living in Love, knowing that love is what makes us truly alive.
Tempted as we are, goaded, prodded, worn out by daily struggle and the Devil whispering in our ear it is easy to forget that we are here to serve God, that the love of God, the love that we give in our work and our play and our family and friends is the true bread of heaven.

Making Enemies

A German friend was giving me his slant on the dangerous standoff between the West and Russia.
He was telling me of his grandmother's experience in the Ruhr in the 1920s, of how the French occupying troops troops treated the local German population with scorn and contempt. He contrasted this to the American occupying troops in 1945, how the Americans treated the Germans to bubble gum, cigarettes and respect.
Then he turned to the defeat of Russia in the Cold War, how the West treated Russia with contempt, how by using international institutions such as the IMF and local placemen such as Yeltsin and his corrupt crony capitalist entourage, the West ripped the heart out of Russia, expropriating billions of dollars, causing Russians untold suffering and countless deaths.
From this low point, during the government of Mr. Putin, Russia has risen again, prosperous and proud, fully aware that the West only means to degrade them and reduce them to the level of third world serfs.
And such is the danger of the aggressive policy the West is pursuing against Russia.  NATO, in expanding its empire of bases has already taken over Libya, and is threatening Russia's only Mediterranean base in Syria. By aiming at Russia's historic base on the  Black Sea, NATO is attacking a core interest of the Russian State.
But, twenty five years ago, the West could have brought Russia in as a friend. As my German friend pointed out, the West could have introduced a sort of Marshall Plan, to integrate a prosperous Russia into a Western led world economy.
But it was not to be. Habits of domination die hard.

Robert Herrick - A True Lent

Is this a fast , - to keep
The larder lean,
And clean,
From fat of veal and sheep?

Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?

Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragged to go,
Or show
A downcast look, and sour?

No! 'Tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul.

It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate, -
To circumcise thy life.

To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin, -
And that's to keep thy Lent

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 12
'But as many received him, to them he gave power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.'

The previous verse is qualified a little here in this verse. The rejection of the Lord by his creatures is not absolute. Some people received him. Some saw the Living God in their midst.
And those who received him, the Lord gave eternal life, true life, not the half-life of appetite and gratification, but the life of the Kingdom of Heaven, giving glory to God, living eternally as the sons of God.
These blessed ones, 'the sons of God', believe on his name, that is they believe that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, and will be, eternally the Son of God, made flesh, God Incarnate.
The Incarnation is a wonderful mystery, the unity of matter and God, the inclusion of the material in God, the reconciliation of Creator and creation. There is no duality here, no false Eastern spirituality of self-harm and bodily abuse, no hatred of the body. By being the Son of Man, God honoured our human existence. He lived and suffered and died, not only for us, but with us too. Such great love God stoops to bestow upon his creatures! The least we can do is to receive him with humble love and give all the glory to God.

Dambisa Moyo - Winner Takes All

An excerpt from Dambisa Moyo's informative book, Winner Takes All:

'The estimated one billion people on earth who go without food every day are almost perfectly offset by the one billion people medically deemed to be obese, a disease attributable, at least in part, to overeating.
This shocking symmetry suggests that beyond the issue of waste, food is severely misallocated. But although reducing waste and more equitably allocating food are possibilities that quickly suggest themselves, they are also very expensive and, ultimately, should be unnecessary because many currently malnourished regions, like Africa, have plenty of tillable land sitting fallow. This unproductive land in the middle of a continent racked by hunger is, in turn, largely a result of a system of incentives and disincentives for food production.
We have already seen how each year many countries, including some of the world's leading industrialised economies, pursue aggressive subsidy and tariff programmes that effectively lock out the agricultural produce emanating from the rest of the world. The US Farm Bill and the European Common Agricultural Policy each pump hundreds of billions of dollars toward artificially bolstering their farmers and their domestic agricultural sectors. By covering much of the cost of production at home, these subsidies price other countries out of their food market. Not only do these government policies discourage food production elsewhere; they actually encourage overproduction of food at home. The resulting trade distortions tend to disproportionately disadvantage the world's poorest agricultural producing countries, such as those in Africa and South America.
The United States and France are two of the worst offenders. Fearful of relying on other nations for their food in the event of a global war and keen to protect their agricultural markets and win the backing of their powerful farming lobbies, these countries have pursued trade restrictions, subsidy packages, and barriers to keep out foreign produce. In the United States alone the total annual amount of farm subsidies stands at around 15 billion US dollars. The 2002 US Farm Security and Rural Investment Act has rewarded US farmers with nearly 200 billion US dollars in subsidies in the subsequent ten years, 70 billion US dollars more than previous programmes and representing as much as an 80% increase in certain subsidies.
The US subsidy programmes have the greatest effects on grain, including wheat, corn, sorghum, barley, rice, and oats, but they also include peanuts, tobacco, soybeans, cotton, sugar, and milk. Excess food production is often wasted or, in a nastily ironic twist, sent as food aid to regions where agricultural production has been decimated by the very government policies that have discouraged these poorer regions from growing crops.

Women Are No Better Than Men

Mary Malone writes:
There is a sort of reverse racism where the Irish or the Scots can say rude things about the English, but the English, however poor and battered they may be, are expected to bear upon themselves the sins, alleged or real of their race. I know Revolting Peasant has told me countless times how he is fed up with being blamed for the Potato Famine, the Highland Clearances and the Slavery of the Peoples of the Africa, despite the fact that this is historical garbage, and anyway, he and Dick were ploughing their fields and scattering (and drinking loco mead) at the time.
Likewise, women can use a sort of pseudo history to give themselves victim status, and in reverse sexist fashion, claim that women are better than men.
You only have to look at some of the dreadful modern women who have had power to realise that women are no better. In America, we see Hilary 'kill Gaddafi' Clinton or Madeleine 'a price worth paying' Albright, and in England facilitators of kiddie fiddlers such as Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Hodge, all of whom put their careers before the welfare of innocents, or Cherie Blair, wife of a war criminal who thinks we should put our careers before our children, not to mention the blessed Margaret, who for all her good intentions, screwed up big style.
 No, in this season of Lent, let us remember our own sins, and not those of others. Let us cut out the blame game. Some cultures may be better than others, sometimes men or women may appear to behave better than the complimentary gender, but deep down we  are  as bad as each other.

Ukraine - A Reality Check

I've tried not to write about the ongoing power play in the Ukraine but, reading the news journals, the absurdity of what is being said by the Vichy press and the politicians of Soviet Britain becomes ever more clear. So, to make a few points:
The democratically elected Ukrainian government was overthrown last week.
The democratically elected government of the Ukraine was overthrown with the encouragement of our government, amongst others.
The new regime in Kiev is full of unsavoury characters, corrupt old politicos, racist fanatics, etc.
The Ukrainian coup was launched by people who want to leave their own country, but feared that they might have to stay.
The Crimea is part of Russia. We all know that. Florence Nightingale knew that.
The Ukraine is part of Russia. In 1917 it was part of Russia, and continued to be under the new name for Russia, the USSR.
Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Belarus are all part of 'Russia'. Moscow, Kiev and Minsk are all Russian cities. Napoleon knew that.
Very few people in Soviet Britain, apart from our masters, object to Vladimir Putin. Under his rule, Russia has regained its prosperity, and after 70 years or more of politically correct rule it is regaining its values.
Russia is the only remaining Christian world power. Like the Russians, most people value family and freedom, and not just health and safety.
How many countries has Russia bombed in the past twenty years?

Lent - Christless Christianity

John Ball writes:
There's a lot of ignorance in this world and most of it is self-imposed. It's like there is a lead ceiling that prevents people from letting their minds and spirits fly. This lead ceiling is their own narcissism. Most people are deeply interested in themselves, view their 'lives' as spectators, consume their own minds and spirits as commodity consumers.
On Sunday I went to church and yet again I heard a sermon about our relationship with God, a sermon which was virtually Christ free. The minister believes this is what his congregation wants to hear, but is he right, and is it what God wants to hear?
It is a false gospel to speak about our loving Father, how he has a plan for us, about our commitment to him, without hardly mentioning Jesus Christ. It is Christ who takes us out of ourselves on wings up to heaven, to his reality of selfless sacrificial love.
They talk about being forgiven, but what is forgiveness without Christ? And how can we forgive others?
If it is our commitment that has given us a new start, and our decision that has given us a relationship with God, and our own efforts that keep us within the bounds of the high end of bourgeois righteousness, then what place Christ, who has to be dragged out now and again  like an embarrassing older relative?
What place the terrible and awesome events of the crucifixion and the resurrection in a service of jolly songs and self congratulation?
But these preachers of the false gospel, the self absorbed gospel, the psychotherapeutic gospel, like those who preach the social gospel,  chose to ignore Christ. There is little compassion, humility, forgiveness in such people. They are wolves in sheep's clothing, people more concerned with maintaining their position than telling the Truth.
A sermon should always preach Christ - Christ crucified and Christ resurrected.
How else should we praise our Lord? How else can we rise from the grave of the self?
Here in the season of Lent let us contemplate the greatness of Christ's forgiveness, how it is he who rescues us from the trough of despair, keeps us from falling into the pit of selfish depravity; he and not ourselves who raises up to the heights of selfless love.