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.

Boris Johnson - Remove Their Children

It is easy to dismiss Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, as an adulterous, narcissistic clown, but there again, so was Mussolini. Indeed, he is the one politician in the United Kingdom who actively promotes a personality cult. For this reason alone we should be wary if he were ever to reach high office, and we have good reason to scorn the electorate of that formerly English city, who have been so foolish to chose him.
Johnson's latest mutterings show his authoritarian leanings.
He wants Social Services to remove the children of a certain class of dissident, those he and they deign to be Islamists. I'm not very keen on these beardy hate mongers myself, but if they've done something wrong, then charge them under the law! If they haven't stolen, murdered, raped, attacked or intimidated anyone, then leave them alone!
To take away the children of political dissidents is a great evil. To remove the children from any parent is a terrible and grave act, full of awful repercussions for both the children and the parents. Once the principle of removal of children for ideological reasons has been established there will be no end to it.
All sorts of dissidents from 'nationalists' to 'social conservatives' to bloggers who step out of line will live under the shadow of the State kidnapping of their children.
Remove Johnson asap, or face the consequences of his corporate Bolshevik nightmare.

Sappho - The Lovely Grove Of Apple Trees

Leave Crete and come to this holy dwelling
To the lovely grove of apple trees
To your altars smoking with frankinsence.

Cool water rushes through the apple branches
Rose bushes lay their shadow on the ground
And from the glistening leaves
Sleep pours down

Here in the meadow my horses feed,
The gentle flowers of spring bloom,
And the wind blows softly.

Aphrodite, take this honey nectar
And pour it so gracefully into
Our golden cups
Mingling your joy with the festival of our love.

A Verse On Sunday

The Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 11:
'He came unto his own and his own received him not.'

This must be one of the saddest verses in the Bible.
Perhaps many of us feel excluded at times from those to whom we feel we belong, chiefly family, but also friends and colleagues and associates, exiled and rejected for who knows what reason.
Here, in this verse, we see the Lord not being recognised by the world he created. Blinded by self, sinful mankind could not see God in his own creation. Engrossed by our petty concerns people simply seek the aid of the nearest idol, some Saint Anthony, or some State Agency, or some Ideology 'ism' to help us through the day.
In some ways things have not changed much since Jesus walked the earth. As society collapses and service and sacrificial love become obsolete, and humanity thinks only of gratification and self righteousness, all around us we hear atheists prattling on in their stupidity and immaturity, peddling heir evil, rejecting the Lord, blinded by self and hate.