Even Tracey May had to dump her from the Full and Far-reaching Cover-up into Westminster Beasting, too bent even for the Home Office, too close to her own corruption for it to trouble her nostrils.
Now, the old buzzard has launched a disestablishing attack on Britain as a Christian state. It isn't, she says. Or it shouldn't be. Why not? Well, basically because she says so, and because few people go to church; statistics about church attendance serving to neutralise almost two thousand years of history. More people go to the mosque than to the parish church, therefore we are no longer a Christian country and the very idea that we are needs to be eradicated. By positive discrimination.
If she was brown, dressed in a burka, and thusly attacking the fundamentals of British life, she'd be in Belmarsh by now but her Ladyship is of the Charmed Circle of Celebrity, like her old dinner-party chum, Leon Brittan, of whom no ill can now be said.
I'm a very busy man.
Within MediaMinster, their own dead have no good deeds to their account but their sins are interred with their bones and although common criminals they may not be traduced. Whether he was nonce or not, Leon Brittan was a cruel monster, here's hoping that Satan, in festive mood, gives him a Christmas white-hot poker up his arse, for ever and ever.
Among the quick, though, and the unpunished, Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Beard, too, as part of Butler Shoss's Reporting team, has decided that we are no longer a Christian country.
He has always disappointed me, Rowan Williams, firstly, by being Canterbury in the first place and then by being such a wimp at it; he is a Stringy, you see, like me, a knower of the Riffs, Reels and Ragas captured from our common musicality and all writ down by the Incredible String Band, how could he still be a prelate, an Establishment toady, how could he be Vice's functionary, as, in his collusion in ecclesiatical beasting, he is. Beardy, though, the most showily thoughtful of recent Canterburys, has now resolved that C of E primaries must be outlawed, that King Brian must crown-ed be by Hindi and Muslem and Jewish clergypersons.
Beardy, wedded for life to the glaring preposterous contradiction that is ecumenism, serves none of the Abrahamic religions and betrays them all with his limp homogeneity, speed-blending imam and rabbi and vicar in some pseudo-spiritual NutriBullet, producing a universal person of Faith, a GodlessHeathenBastard for all seasons.
Despite, however, diluting to pointlessness the idea of Faith he now wants imams and rabbis to sit in the House of Lords, presumably on the Vaguely Good benches, bringing fresh, mad superstitions to the already corrupt, unaccountable and anti-democratic criminal institution.
Any rational person would see the Lords for what it is, a place of organised crime, rotten beyond remedy, peopled with sneering degenerates. Jesus'd fire a round of fucks into them, Beardy wants to make them a fully-representative, multi-faith LGBT knocking shop.
But bugger Beardy, we can all repudiate the church and abhor churchpersons - his own gig, servant to degenerate, parasitic royalty, cost the hideous martyrdoms of his co-religionists, is rooted in lust and arrogance and like an American president with the Constitution, tramples upon its own founding document. One need not be a churchgoer, indeed, one need not even believe in God - Fuck me, I certainly don't - to despise the likes of Rowan Williams, contorted, as he is, in knots of cowardice, terrified that he might accidentally Stand Up! Stand Up for Jesus, snivelling and creepy-crawlying about, doing anything bar preaching the Gospel. But bugger him, he doesn't matter, save to those who hiss and simper and backstab at the Synod of Depravity, who seethe and slander and see the Church of England as a deliciously spiteful game of bridge, the faith it purports to safeguard no more than a moveable feast, laid to sate Debauchery's appetites.
No matter what they say, though, the commentators,
He has always disappointed me, Rowan Williams, firstly, by being Canterbury in the first place and then by being such a wimp at it; he is a Stringy, you see, like me, a knower of the Riffs, Reels and Ragas captured from our common musicality and all writ down by the Incredible String Band, how could he still be a prelate, an Establishment toady, how could he be Vice's functionary, as, in his collusion in ecclesiatical beasting, he is. Beardy, though, the most showily thoughtful of recent Canterburys, has now resolved that C of E primaries must be outlawed, that King Brian must crown-ed be by Hindi and Muslem and Jewish clergypersons.
Beardy, wedded for life to the glaring preposterous contradiction that is ecumenism, serves none of the Abrahamic religions and betrays them all with his limp homogeneity, speed-blending imam and rabbi and vicar in some pseudo-spiritual NutriBullet, producing a universal person of Faith, a GodlessHeathenBastard for all seasons.
Despite, however, diluting to pointlessness the idea of Faith he now wants imams and rabbis to sit in the House of Lords, presumably on the Vaguely Good benches, bringing fresh, mad superstitions to the already corrupt, unaccountable and anti-democratic criminal institution.
Any rational person would see the Lords for what it is, a place of organised crime, rotten beyond remedy, peopled with sneering degenerates. Jesus'd fire a round of fucks into them, Beardy wants to make them a fully-representative, multi-faith LGBT knocking shop.
But bugger Beardy, we can all repudiate the church and abhor churchpersons - his own gig, servant to degenerate, parasitic royalty, cost the hideous martyrdoms of his co-religionists, is rooted in lust and arrogance and like an American president with the Constitution, tramples upon its own founding document. One need not be a churchgoer, indeed, one need not even believe in God - Fuck me, I certainly don't - to despise the likes of Rowan Williams, contorted, as he is, in knots of cowardice, terrified that he might accidentally Stand Up! Stand Up for Jesus, snivelling and creepy-crawlying about, doing anything bar preaching the Gospel. But bugger him, he doesn't matter, save to those who hiss and simper and backstab at the Synod of Depravity, who seethe and slander and see the Church of England as a deliciously spiteful game of bridge, the faith it purports to safeguard no more than a moveable feast, laid to sate Debauchery's appetites.
No matter what they say, though, the commentators,
almost everything about us is Christian or - recently - Christian Socialist in origin; in its impetus, the welfare state is a Christian Socialist idea, rooted in the Sermon on the Mount, the secular pluralists, therefore, face a paradox: the egalitarianism via which they seek to cripple tradition springs from that tradition, is its creature and the secular pluralist no more owns Freedom than do the clergy own Christianity. We all own them, Freedom and Christianity; they are not in the gift of some bilious old lawyer, some wretched, snivelling archbishop.
How came we here, a place where we are taught to deride who we are and instead elevate some ragbag of meaningless, aspirational, inclusive, pluralist isms? How is it that somewhere along Ruin's dark highway it was decided, without debate, that the very thing which attracts foreigners to Britain - its Britishness - must be decried, degraded and abolished and that those who still suffer from Britishness must be cured of it, must become healthily, sneeringly secular, which means, as far as can be deduced, that anything goes: same-sex marriage; religious cruelty to animals, the explicit or implicit suppression of women and children by religious patriarchs; the refusal of even senior health service professionals to learn English; the sprouting of alien places of contrary and hostile and violent worship; the farming of young British girls by alien men and the multiple bogus claiming of welfare benefits and the utterly fatuous proclamation that any number of people may come and live here, without even let or hindrance, just because it's kind-of right.
The detestable, money-grubbing bandits of the race relations industry have long since diversified into a multiplicity of shouty, blaming enterprises, damning the rest of us for our every waking decision, inventing caricatures of disthinking and disfeeling, we are deniers of this or that, phobists of the other, they upend traditional, modest self-restraint and bawl abuse at those who see Pride as unseemly at best;
Sisters of Mercy,
the women-haters, the sex-haters; such a joyless bunch of tossers.
who see cock-waving as immodest and improper, who resist the idea of family as purchaseable commodity and who refute the desirability or possibility of trans-genderisation - butchering and inverting a man's penis does not him a her make - creating a lunatic, hyper-ethical, witch-hunting climate wherein, so long as they say the right words, mouth the right cliches, the sharp operators, like Volkswagen, by pressing the right judgemental jargon buttons can delude us, extort from us and fuck the entire planet at the same time. Merely by paying lip service to the blame-babble of poorly educated lobbyists for Grievance and Pluralism and Renewables the very ground - spiritual, educational and geo-fucking-logical - can be ripped from beneath us. Screeching, spiteful queens or rapacious energy carpetbaggers, they want to frack everybody, everybody's beliefs, everybody's values and they have devised the language by which to accomplish Ruin. Pluralism, this negligent, unsustainable, thoughtless and facetious doctrine is voiced not only cynically and opportunistically by the predator but also as though 'twere a wedding vow, by the empty-headed.
The detestable, money-grubbing bandits of the race relations industry have long since diversified into a multiplicity of shouty, blaming enterprises, damning the rest of us for our every waking decision, inventing caricatures of disthinking and disfeeling, we are deniers of this or that, phobists of the other, they upend traditional, modest self-restraint and bawl abuse at those who see Pride as unseemly at best;
the women-haters, the sex-haters; such a joyless bunch of tossers.
who see cock-waving as immodest and improper, who resist the idea of family as purchaseable commodity and who refute the desirability or possibility of trans-genderisation - butchering and inverting a man's penis does not him a her make - creating a lunatic, hyper-ethical, witch-hunting climate wherein, so long as they say the right words, mouth the right cliches, the sharp operators, like Volkswagen, by pressing the right judgemental jargon buttons can delude us, extort from us and fuck the entire planet at the same time. Merely by paying lip service to the blame-babble of poorly educated lobbyists for Grievance and Pluralism and Renewables the very ground - spiritual, educational and geo-fucking-logical - can be ripped from beneath us. Screeching, spiteful queens or rapacious energy carpetbaggers, they want to frack everybody, everybody's beliefs, everybody's values and they have devised the language by which to accomplish Ruin. Pluralism, this negligent, unsustainable, thoughtless and facetious doctrine is voiced not only cynically and opportunistically by the predator but also as though 'twere a wedding vow, by the empty-headed.
I do enjoy some of the stuff on Russia Today, the Kremlin-funded equivalent and more often than not the superior of the dreadful PBC News Channel. Predictably, though, the other day, after Dame Sloss's report, RT, rather disappointingly, adopted the old, faithful expression of Christianity being the lackey of running dog capitalist imperialism - I am sure it is and has been, incidentally, but it has also been much more. The show in question set a gobby young muslim prat
THE NEW INQUISITION.
I am a second-generation British muslim.
But pluralist, right? Pluralist too.
There is only one God and Mohammed is his prophet.
But that don't make me no less a pluralist.
If you say so, sweetie
against a comparitavely gracious member of something called the English Defence party, he may actually be a redneck, this gentleman, I dunno, but he was by no means thuggish or unpleasant, no matter, the pluralist prick stomped his egalitarian boots all over him, refusing him a word-in-edgeways, demanding that he unthink himself; had I been there I'd have punched the vile little shit in the gob, told him to fuck off back to where they burn widows and try his impertinence among those from whom he is descended, instead of berating an old English gentleman, made anxious, even incautious, by the almost instantaneous eclipse of his own values. And then I would've stomped on his head. Nothing to do with his race, just his fucking shouty rudeness. I'd do the same to Mr Paul Nutter, of the Poundlanders, and he's as WASP as man may be. Although I suspect he is a woman. No dis intended to women.
I am a second-generation British muslim.
But pluralist, right? Pluralist too.
There is only one God and Mohammed is his prophet.
But that don't make me no less a pluralist.
If you say so, sweetie
against a comparitavely gracious member of something called the English Defence party, he may actually be a redneck, this gentleman, I dunno, but he was by no means thuggish or unpleasant, no matter, the pluralist prick stomped his egalitarian boots all over him, refusing him a word-in-edgeways, demanding that he unthink himself; had I been there I'd have punched the vile little shit in the gob, told him to fuck off back to where they burn widows and try his impertinence among those from whom he is descended, instead of berating an old English gentleman, made anxious, even incautious, by the almost instantaneous eclipse of his own values. And then I would've stomped on his head. Nothing to do with his race, just his fucking shouty rudeness. I'd do the same to Mr Paul Nutter, of the Poundlanders, and he's as WASP as man may be. Although I suspect he is a woman. No dis intended to women.
It is not the Christianity of white, Anglo-Saxon protestantism to which we must cling but that of Saint Patrick, of the Venerable Bede, of Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, of Celt and Saxon and Norman, of those piously practical men who accidentally brought us poetry, history, order, law and the idea of our improvability.
For the greatest part of our history, our lives were measured by the hours and days of Christian worship, by Feast days and Holy days; for that greatest part, the Church, Roman and Anglican, created and guarded our record of ourselves, teaching and nursing us, praising and judging us; only in the Rennaissance did Knowledge escape the cloister, never to be recaptured; our New Worlds were conquered with the sword and the Bible, our marital beds o'erseen from vestry and confessional; our disputes were adjudicated by abbott and bishop; our sins were forgiven, our souls bought speedy Rest by masses sung in chantries; our universities were staffed by skypilot scholars; for the longest time the church owned Time itself, ringing bells by sundial or by guesswork, eventually owning the very first clocks and ordering our days to the minute; it owned our souls, it owned the Word and it owned the measurement and apportionment of Time.
Spying upon us, setting us one against the other, the church and the throne racked us, ripped us and burnt us, the better that we might worship them. The Church Puritan killed half of us, killed the king and forced us into a joyless commonwealth of drab misery.
And on and on, through wars and famines and depressions, through scandal and abdication, through repression and now through the blessed New Gospel of Sodom and Gomorrah and through the parable of the purchased infant, the church has taken a prominent role, blessing the babies, the brides and the bombers on the runway.
For some time, now, we have practised a refined Christianity, an informal credo, undiminished, really, by our reluctance to attend formal worship - our rights and wrongs are hall-marked by it; our tolerance of Otherness, our longing for fair treatment for all; our burgeoning wonder at the Creation; these precepts are not owned by the cheeky bastards at Stonewall, by the Green parties, by laughably unethical corporations and rotten, thievingbastard political filthsters. Restraint, respect, neighbourliness and awe, this shit comes straight from the New Testament.
We are Christian as the night follows the day, a time may come when these islands are something else, its people most likely speaking Mandarin, when Christianity is as relevant as Druidism. That time is not now.
This is a Christian country, it is not the case that we grow more Muslim, on the contrary, more Muslims will adopt Christian ways than will Christians start praying to Mecca, that is axiomatic, for this is a Christian country, in language, history, law, politics, art, philosophy, architecture, idiom and custom. It is arguable that in architecture the influence of Christianity has lessened but in the others it remains embedded, irremoveable.
Unless we launch a cultural revolution, burning everything written from the time of Bede's Ecclesiatical Histories
and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles up until the present day then Christianity is in every word which we read, whether we go to church or not.
Unless we repeal every law passed for a thousand years, we remain a Christian jurisdiction. Unless we erase every note of music, from Byrd's Mass for Four Voices up to, say, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, then ours remains a Christian music. Unless we demolish the cathedrals and churches and chapels and abbeys and monasteries - and do it far more ruthlessly than did Henry Tudor the Eighth - and bulldoze the graveyards and the war memorials and the village and market crosses, and raze to the ground the courts and the palaces and the universities, unless, in short, we nuke the whole country, then it remains demonstrably Christian.
That's near enough for jazz.
How do we, then, resist those, the pluralists, like Butler Sloss, who would tell us, sniffily, that day is night, black is white, two'n'two make five?
How do we silence those who would silence Germaine Greer for stating the obvious?
And here's the rub.
Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.
If you tell enough people, for long enough, that they are stupid, that you know better than them, that you will make for them decisions which are theirs; that they are wrong in their every thought, word and deed then what you get, eventually, is this.
I have long described Trump as Fat Alec Salmond's foreign owner and lamented Salmond's destruction of the Aberdeen site of special scientific interest and outstanding natural beauty which was literally physically bullied through by the Tribesmen, that Trumpy might build a golf course.
I guess that's one retirement sinecure about which Salmond et al will now have to be very circumspect, lest they wind up in jail with Seph Blatter.
Trump at home, anyway. I can't quite see what the fuss is all about, except that people love to be outraged, anything'll do. He is saying that, what with the way things are, no more Muslims should be allowed into the States. It is not exactly a betrayal of America's founding principles. New England, as the name implies, and then the Revolutiaries, were largely English Puritans, fleeing discrimination and persecution at home. There are no Muslim signatories to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. As I understand it, what Trump is saying is that things need to settle down a bit for immigration to continue as normal. What Obama and Bush and Clinton have done is kidnap, imprison, torture and murder Muslims, as well as killing hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians, men, women and children, on spurious, illegal grounds, Obama and President Trousers are likely to torture and kill many, many more; Trump, telling them not to show up, is, by comparison with other politicians/presidents, hugely humanitarian.
But that's beside the point, Trump, like Farage and lePen, represents the failure of so-called pluralism, anything goes-ism.
If, as may happen, he is elected, it will not be the right-wingers to blame, all they will have done is vote for him, it is secular pluralism, inclusivity, uncontrolled immigration; crooked, beasting politicians and an unrepresentative and degenerate media which have created him. As much as the hillbilly redneck's, as much as the white supremacist's Trump and the New Right are the creatures of a generation of GodlessHeatheBastards like the former Archbishop of Canterbury and the wretched Justice Butler-Sloss.
Be not deceived, Rowan, my man;
God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth,
that also shall he reap.
For the greatest part of our history, our lives were measured by the hours and days of Christian worship, by Feast days and Holy days; for that greatest part, the Church, Roman and Anglican, created and guarded our record of ourselves, teaching and nursing us, praising and judging us; only in the Rennaissance did Knowledge escape the cloister, never to be recaptured; our New Worlds were conquered with the sword and the Bible, our marital beds o'erseen from vestry and confessional; our disputes were adjudicated by abbott and bishop; our sins were forgiven, our souls bought speedy Rest by masses sung in chantries; our universities were staffed by skypilot scholars; for the longest time the church owned Time itself, ringing bells by sundial or by guesswork, eventually owning the very first clocks and ordering our days to the minute; it owned our souls, it owned the Word and it owned the measurement and apportionment of Time.
Spying upon us, setting us one against the other, the church and the throne racked us, ripped us and burnt us, the better that we might worship them. The Church Puritan killed half of us, killed the king and forced us into a joyless commonwealth of drab misery.
And on and on, through wars and famines and depressions, through scandal and abdication, through repression and now through the blessed New Gospel of Sodom and Gomorrah and through the parable of the purchased infant, the church has taken a prominent role, blessing the babies, the brides and the bombers on the runway.
For some time, now, we have practised a refined Christianity, an informal credo, undiminished, really, by our reluctance to attend formal worship - our rights and wrongs are hall-marked by it; our tolerance of Otherness, our longing for fair treatment for all; our burgeoning wonder at the Creation; these precepts are not owned by the cheeky bastards at Stonewall, by the Green parties, by laughably unethical corporations and rotten, thievingbastard political filthsters. Restraint, respect, neighbourliness and awe, this shit comes straight from the New Testament.
We are Christian as the night follows the day, a time may come when these islands are something else, its people most likely speaking Mandarin, when Christianity is as relevant as Druidism. That time is not now.
This is a Christian country, it is not the case that we grow more Muslim, on the contrary, more Muslims will adopt Christian ways than will Christians start praying to Mecca, that is axiomatic, for this is a Christian country, in language, history, law, politics, art, philosophy, architecture, idiom and custom. It is arguable that in architecture the influence of Christianity has lessened but in the others it remains embedded, irremoveable.
Unless we launch a cultural revolution, burning everything written from the time of Bede's Ecclesiatical Histories
and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles up until the present day then Christianity is in every word which we read, whether we go to church or not.
Unless we repeal every law passed for a thousand years, we remain a Christian jurisdiction. Unless we erase every note of music, from Byrd's Mass for Four Voices up to, say, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, then ours remains a Christian music. Unless we demolish the cathedrals and churches and chapels and abbeys and monasteries - and do it far more ruthlessly than did Henry Tudor the Eighth - and bulldoze the graveyards and the war memorials and the village and market crosses, and raze to the ground the courts and the palaces and the universities, unless, in short, we nuke the whole country, then it remains demonstrably Christian.
That's near enough for jazz.
How do we, then, resist those, the pluralists, like Butler Sloss, who would tell us, sniffily, that day is night, black is white, two'n'two make five?
How do we silence those who would silence Germaine Greer for stating the obvious?
And here's the rub.
Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.
If you tell enough people, for long enough, that they are stupid, that you know better than them, that you will make for them decisions which are theirs; that they are wrong in their every thought, word and deed then what you get, eventually, is this.
I have long described Trump as Fat Alec Salmond's foreign owner and lamented Salmond's destruction of the Aberdeen site of special scientific interest and outstanding natural beauty which was literally physically bullied through by the Tribesmen, that Trumpy might build a golf course.
I guess that's one retirement sinecure about which Salmond et al will now have to be very circumspect, lest they wind up in jail with Seph Blatter.
Trump at home, anyway. I can't quite see what the fuss is all about, except that people love to be outraged, anything'll do. He is saying that, what with the way things are, no more Muslims should be allowed into the States. It is not exactly a betrayal of America's founding principles. New England, as the name implies, and then the Revolutiaries, were largely English Puritans, fleeing discrimination and persecution at home. There are no Muslim signatories to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. As I understand it, what Trump is saying is that things need to settle down a bit for immigration to continue as normal. What Obama and Bush and Clinton have done is kidnap, imprison, torture and murder Muslims, as well as killing hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians, men, women and children, on spurious, illegal grounds, Obama and President Trousers are likely to torture and kill many, many more; Trump, telling them not to show up, is, by comparison with other politicians/presidents, hugely humanitarian.
But that's beside the point, Trump, like Farage and lePen, represents the failure of so-called pluralism, anything goes-ism.
If, as may happen, he is elected, it will not be the right-wingers to blame, all they will have done is vote for him, it is secular pluralism, inclusivity, uncontrolled immigration; crooked, beasting politicians and an unrepresentative and degenerate media which have created him. As much as the hillbilly redneck's, as much as the white supremacist's Trump and the New Right are the creatures of a generation of GodlessHeatheBastards like the former Archbishop of Canterbury and the wretched Justice Butler-Sloss.
Be not deceived, Rowan, my man;
God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth,
that also shall he reap.
50 comments:
Indeed: it is staggering that the only voices of reason are Trump and Putin.
Having lived through this I'm astonished both by the pace of the decline, and by the absence of any reason for this. Why would we wish to terminate our civilisation?
Why is the West (USA) determined to trigger WW3 with Russia and China? None of this makes any sense to me.
I suppose the Romans felt the same when their era ended.
Superb. Your section on why this country cannot be unmade as Christian is a sort of call to arms and soon I fear that sides will have to be taken. All that you recite of what has composed us is worth the fighting for. This rank, condescending, Patrician LIberal witch is in a long line of judicial sneerers who have sponsored the Cultural Lie and disgraced our Law, a Law whose fragile integrity has always itself depended on Christianity. May the God in whom we do not believe help us all.
PS there's a good piece by Snooty Moore in the Telegraph today, observing how the stupidity and cowardice of Merkel and her kind are set to kill off Christian democracy.
I remember watching a program on TV many (15+) years ago, about the activities of a collection of Jewish archeologists/scientists, who investigated the origins of Judaism (from whence came Christianity).
These learned gentlemen were Fellows at a Jewish university and had spent many years visiting the places they were studying and spending months at each site.
Bit by bit they came to a logical, understandable and believable conclusion.
The contents of the Torah were devised by the first proper King of the united Jews, Jonah, as a means of uniting the two existing Jewish factions and keeping the peace.
Virtually all the Torah is myth but it was so successful that its fictional content has been the base of Western religion for centuries.
Many religions seem to follow this pattern and may be their origins lie somewhere back in distant antiquity amongst the bones of the dinosaurs.
The misstep, if there was but one, was when mission creep forced the adoption of compulsion alongside opportunity. It would never have occurred to the early adopters to draw up a long list of required orthodoxies - Thous Shalts to add to the Thou Shall Nots.
I mentioned a while back up the road that I was required to sing the hymns at school but the bit I forgot was that it was also an offence not to be in possession of a hymnal, and it had to be the light blue fucking thing from the ymn book shop. This was, of course, a simple answer to the clever-dick teenage mechanism of "I am not singing, Sir, because I don't know the words, Sir, and I forgot my hymn book, Sir."
It is a relative triviality but it is just the same. The objective of having the savage sods singing a hymn for a few minutes per day is perverted and reissued as the procedural. A chit, a binary league table of conformance sneaks its bastard way into the world. A Christian Socialist would have bought a great fucking stack of hymn books and stood at the door and handed them out as the louts entered assembly.
The notion that you can force people to a better something by drawing up a rulebook is a flawed one, and dare I say here that it is the socialist end of the christian socialist ethic doing that? We have now this finessed into an economic lever of disctretionary expenditure. And the Lord said, I shall make thee thin by taxing thy pop. It's the fags, or the pop, or the turkey twizzlers but you can't afford them all, and lo it came to pass, you will henceforth be better, and measurably so. And what's more with the pop tax monies we can buy more bombs to exterminate the heathen.
Generally I would agree with you, hymn books should be on the ratesI, along with school uniforms but I also think, mr mongoose that it is, actually, the duty of the family, the tribe or the state to proscribe and discourage dangerous behaviours among its young. I also believe, as you may know, that the prohibition of so-called drugs is an insuffereable overreach of the criminal law; I can, however, and do support the idea of a sugar tax. My own diabetes is genetic, I stopped taking sugar in my teens and was never overweight, I was always going to get it. That is not the case with today's fat kids, they can and should be spared all this shit, and it costs a fucking fortune, to service and patient, absolutely unsustainable and probably incurable. I don't know if you have seen kids who suffer from the hugely deleterious sugar rush, and start running around, uncontrollable and almost incoherent, but I have and it is a sorry, sorry sight, they will never be engineers, just special needs people, to add diabetes to their knowledge and learning shortfall is as bad as giving them fags in infancy. The only good thing Jack McConnell ever did was to ban smoking in public places in Scotland and it is now in rapid decline, that, and the reduction of sugar in the national diet, the wearing of seat belts and the prohibition of drunken driving, those, I feel, constitute a good kind of rule book, one which does not automatically lead to more oppressive measures. A sugar tax on poor families is imperfect, I know, better than blindness, kidney failure and premature death. We are not talking, here, about the odd packet of sweets and a Mars bar but of kids stuffing themselves with pounds of sugar, like a human version of the poor Strasbourg goose, the one that lays the golden liver.
I saw a similar or the same show, m alphons, scholars had researched climate and weather and soil conditions at the time the Jewish dietary restrictions were introduced and found that they were, in fact, sensible public health measures.
I partly disagree with you, about the Judaeo-Chritian continuum but only partly, inasmuch as Christianity broke with Jewish racism and developed a universality of faith, the central message of which was loving thy neighbour, not calling him names.
Yes, from "one before *God*" was inevitable a shift to "*one* before God", as the power of godhead diminished with the rise of reason. Christianity is hoist by its own petard; civilisation could have been arrived at by other routes, ones that did not lead it to be built on the very edge of Ruin. You don't need much pre-Socratic reading to see how fabulous a culture may be built without submission to any idea, a monoGod included. Perhaps something like it will rise from the ruins of this one, but it would need not be ruined much further first.
The basis of religion seems to be power...the obtaining and keeping of it. It's top protagonists always work on the "Do as I say, not do as I do" principle. Just as do the politicians.
Down the ages the Kings have appointed the Bishops and the Bishops have crowned the Kings. What a cosy set up.
I suppose that's right, about the rise of the individual, much accelerated recently and of the concommitant dilution of the collective but Roman Christianity flourishes still in many places as yet unblest by economic development. I have never been troubled by God, or by His existence, although, as I say above, I cannot but value many of the labours of His servants.
What would you recommend, in the way of pre-Socratic reading?
Only one of the bases, m alphons, another is people's need of a sop to their innermost fear of finity, might have been Bertrand Russell, who said that people need something to make intelligible to them what is otherwise totally incomprehensible, the fact and the fear of dying. My landscape is littered with stoney attempts to understand and mitigate Death's implacability, to decipher and harness the cosmic unknowable and to sacrifice others for oneselves. The concept of Above, it is claimed, appeared here, in these islands, in Wiltshire and in Ulster quite spontaneously, five or six thousand years ago, along with the character of the priest, shaman, wise man or woman, a possessor of magic Truth; whether he begat the chief or the chief begat him is a moot point, church and state, one and the same. My home was built for an eighteenth century magic man, a minister of the kirk, a spiritual policeman and magistrate, connected to Divinity. With many servants, he lived to be ninety, when most lived but half that; fathered many children, whose descendants farm here, still and kept the Laird's peace by sermonising shame. His grave is in the kirk, just down the road, a latin epitaph, set aside from his parishioners, in death as in life.
Well, I am sorry for your insight, Mr Ishmael, but you cannot choose sugar over heroin or beer or fags. Or chips or Big Macs or anything else. It is not the State's job to tell any of us what to do with our bellies or our lungs. As ever, the thin end of the wedge is so reasonable, and ends up at the fat end with the chocolate bar nazis in primary schools.
The life expectancy of aboriginal australians - I think we have discussed before - is 50-ish out in rural areas. The well-meaning 200-year incomers tour around the place hectoring and cajoling in equal measure the people who have carved lives out of the most inhospitable of environments just this last 40,000 years. And when their Land Cruisers break down, who saves whom do you think?
Fuck 'em. They may stack their hymn books by the door - hand them out even - but they may not, I am afraid, in this Christian liberal country, require me to sing.
The list of primary material is short, for so little survives. But I suggest you pick up Frederick Raphael's Some Talk of Alexander.
But the state is not telling you what to do, mr mongoose, it is merely, via taxation, erecting safety barriers. You are free to kill yourself by any means of which you can conceive. And I am not choosing sugar over beer and fags, merely noting its toxicity and agreeing that its sale should be subject to the same cautions and restraints as beer and fags, than which it is far more dangerous in effect and scope. You do have grossly obese people down there, don't you?
Better, anyway, that people are bullied off sugar than that, as must happen, they are turned away from the hospital door. And would you say that the sugar cube polio vaccine of our childhood was a step on the road to the health nazis.?
Thanks, I will; what a lovely title. Partially the opening line of the British Grenadiers.
You will like his style, I think; it might even persuade you the word "Cambridge" occasionally has a non-pejorative sense.
Fucking safety barriers? Has the Orcadian weed crop been especially strong this year, Mr Ishmael?
The notion that the Pop Tax - as we must call it - is anything other than the state indulging its twin vices of money-grabbing and impertinent finger-wagging is absurd. How about they fuck off and try to stop stealing from us before they start lecturing us about our Vimto habits, eh? And, as it happens, I am against all of the cautions and restraints that nanny imposes. Taxation as a lever of medical conformity or social coercion is a gross erosion of liberty - and a fucking idle waste of time for the most part.
A fine polemic Mr I, with which I substantially agree. This is a Christian country, whether one likes it or not, and whether anyone goes to church or not and for all the reasons you state. What was it Churchill said? “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” I do not think we should unduly fear the impact of Dame Butler-Schloss or Archbishop 'Apostate' Beardy - irritating though they may be. After all, not even Stalin and 70 years or so of being soaked in Marxist-Leninist ideology could extinguish the flame of Orthodox Christianity, which is very much back in business in Old Mother Russia. By the way, that picture above the 'Sisters of Mercy', is that the 'Batman' woman? My God! Are there no limits to depravity?
Do you know how much sugar is in a grape? An apricot? A potato? Any of the fancy fruits now touted as the next great health thing?
When you take out the water, what’s left is almost all sugar. Plant cell walls are made of cellulose which is made of glucose. It’s sugar. Plants store energy as starch which is long chains of… glucose. Sugar. All of it.
There is more. There are other types of sugar besides the glucose, fructose, sucrose and lactose you might have heard of. There are really only three sugars in that list. Sucrose is glucose and fructose combined. Lactose is glucose and galactose combined. Never heard of galactose? Every time you put milk on your muesli you’re eating it anyway.
The muesli itself is mostly grain starch and cellulose which, as I’ve already pointed out, is made of sugar.
There are other sugars out there. Arabinose, xylose, mannose, a host of others you’ve never heard of, many of which you can safely eat because you can’t digest them anyway so they won’t make you fat.
Meat contains sugar, stored as glycogen in muscle fibre. That’s glucose too.
Take any meal from any source, treat with enzymes to hydrolyse the polymerised sugar and then do a simple reducing-sugar test such as Fehling’s and you will find that every single meal, no matter the components, is mostly sugar.
"What would you recommend, in the way of pre-Socratic reading?"
I reckon something like one of the early issues of "Dandy" or "Beano". They both have the same relevance today as they had back then!!
Another 'by the way' Mr I... Did you know that Baroness Butler-Sloss chaired the Crown Appointments Committee that appointed Archbishop 'Apostate' Beardy? Interesting...
That is all the more reason, mr henry, that we should not permit CocaCola and the rest to feed us massive amounts of refined sugars.
She also sits on the Ecclesiastical Court of Review, a sort of Church Appeal Court, for when bell, book and candle fail.
Great, how these people collect quango jobs, Lord Chris Pooh had another 11, on top of being at the PBC, they make BoJo look quite modest, him only having three jobs.
'Well, I do know that, mr tdg, having known Cantabrians, outside, as it were, and in here; it is just that those who reach high public office are so surprisingly inept and corrupt that their preferment can only be due to their connections.
I don't think that it is the Curtains lady, mr sg, but whoever he is he would certainly alarm my little warm brown friend, Harris, God knows what children make of him. I wonder how parents explain this sort of encounter: Darling, the large man is just dressing up as a large lady in response to centuries of oppression at the hands of people like Mummy and Daddy and we should all join him in celebration, yes, dear, no, dear, the nuns aren't ladies, either, they're just gentlemen, pretending to be tart ladies, pretending to be nuns, no, dear, they should be quite proud of themselves and so should we, be proud of ourselves, for being proud of them, dressing up as ladies pretending to be nuns to make other gentlemen hot under the wotsaname, yes, darling I inow they have beards, but no, it's nothing for you to be frightened of. In the street? Why do they do it in the street? Well, dear, it's because, well I dunno what it's because of. I just do what I'm told.
mr mongoose, you romantic engineers, you are the true paranoiacs. Universal health care is not a conspiracy to rob and enslave you, at least, not yet. Life extended by vaccination, clean air, clean water, by antiseptics and anti-biotics, by insulin, by heart bypass surgery, by fresh air, sunlight and a better diet, most of these meet your definition of meddling by the nanny state.
And it is but half a decade or so ago, here, that you hymned taxation as another name for civilisation.
Clinging to sugary drinks is like demanding the right to have rickets.
In any event, Winston has set his hamface, quite proply, in his view, against your poptax, as he does with most sensible ideas.
Here's something sweet, but not sugary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK9aENxrtgE
very sweet, mr mike, don't know much Puccini, but then, like most of us, I don't know much of anything.
Ah, but you know me, Mr I, and I don't think that any of those things are the same as depriving little kiddies of their Tango through the threatened impoverishment of their parents. Although I do think that your point about refined sugar is well made, I don't know enough of the science to argue it. It's maybe a bit like alcohol and the Aboriginal - fermented this and that in the bush was a Saturday night out; refined and distilled firewater with which the cunning white eye plied him was the wreck of the soul. I think also that a great many of our young wobbly people should get and buy a football and run about after it a bit.
And there are stout and good reasons for many of those things on your list. Lord knows, for instance, that the anti-vaccination movements are unscientific but are a completely understandable emotional reaction to personal disaster. But vaccinations aren't compulsory, are they, and nor should they be.
How about the wearing of a selt-belt in a car or the not-wearing of a Sikh's motorcycle helmet. Well, I am sorry but I am a Jedi Catholic bastard and my vimto consumption follows the instruction of Master Yoda, and it is a preposterous affront to my religious freedom to tax it. There as even a loon on the radio earlier saying that fattness is the biggest threat to the nation since Adolf stood at that telescope in Boulogne licking his lips.
Well, I don't know any science whatsoever, apart from what I learn here, but I know enough from simple, regular blood sugar measurement to verify what mr henry, said - wonder if he has a Please, Mrs Henry - above, that a couple of grapes can put your blood sugar up; that a drink advertised as having No Added Sugar is actually saturated with natural sugars. But it isn't just diabetes, being grossly overweight strains all the organs and the muscular-skeletal system, leads to depression and low self-esteem, shyness and frustration. I differ from you, I believe that the state in all its forms, should do whatever it can to save people from sugar, to save their fucking lives, to ease their families lives and to preserve such slender fundingh as may remain in the NHS for those ills which are truly unavoidable.
AS to the loon on the radio, he or she is mistaken, obesity is the second biggest threat to the stability of the nation; old people are the first. If you think I am being hysterical, just take ten minutes and look at the figures, look at the numbers of people selling their honmes to fund care and yet, despite that, look at the lack of places, the lack of staff. Here, in a low-wage economy a place in a care home costs a thousand pounds a week, per person, and the average couple will have used the proceeds of their home in 18 months, after which time, the council must pay. How's that for taxation? Those without a home to sell are cared for just the same. Doesn't that make nonsense of the property-owning democracy? Those with dementia. or with massively disabling conditions can require assistance twenty four hours a day - three trained people in shifts plus cover for leave and sickness, 365 days a year, sometimes for decades, while wages are frozen, effectively cut and council taxes are frozen or derisory and national income tax is untouchable. Do have a look, at the costs, of medication, appliances, care, food, nursing, transport and housing for millions upon millions of people. Make your hair stand on end.
A tour de force here, Mr Ishmael, touching on many themes. Will think upon it.
Whilst I can agree with your views on the intake of sugar etc. being a self infliction business I think the matter of state intervention is a bit over the top, as is the nanny state en mass.
The NHS was the first post war con., pulled by the government of the day, to try to gain the support of the people. The following years of socialist "do gooding" left most the population with the idea that idea that they were living in a land flowing with milk and bottle top....gratis.
They failed to appreciate that bureaucracy is a very expensive commodity and politicians love nothing better than bureaucracy because there are millions of pound to be made out of it. It has continued up until the present times with all the PFI corruption and the cost of hiring the "auditors" who also make millions out of it.
There was very little wrong with pre war "health care". What was slightly amiss was the amount of money for big jobs, such as heart transplants (which fortunately they had yet to invent).
There were many private health insurance schemes (one of which saved my life in 1940)
Life runs on sugar. Living things store sugar. If your meal contains flour then it contains starch which is sugar. If it has meat or vegetables in it, it contains sugar. If it is made of algae or insects or bacteria it contains sugar.
Incidentally, the hard shell of insects is made of something called chitin and guess what? It’s made of sugar too. As is chitosan, the outer coating of many moulds and fungi. Including Quorn. N-acetyl glucosamine. Look it up. Glucose with added bits, that’s all it is.
Finding that any ready meal is 60% sugar is no surprise at all. It is not 60% glucose or sucrose because that would be inedible. Most of that sugar is in starch, which isn’t sweet, and in cellulose which isn’t even digestible by humans. All the sugar in cellulose drops out of your other end. It’s called ‘fibre’ and it’s made of sugar. It counts when you measure sugar content and calories but it goes straight through undigested.
It is much worse than that: the vast majority at Cambridge takes away more from the name than it adds. But there is still something there that catalysed a way of thinking in many of us, as nowhere else could have done.
24x7 attendance is 5 shifts of people, Mr Ishmael, give or take the shrapnel of life. And of course, the cost of the care of which you speak isn't a thousand pounds per week - that is the price! Which is an altogether different concept. And there are rules from nanny, you know, about the numbers that may be cared for per body - the rule is (or sud to be) that the number must be sufficient. Excellent! (It's a bit like our Parisian promise of yesterday to keep climate warming to "well below" 2 degrees.) I think however that the out of hours actual and the w/e numbers would make a saint swear.
But you are completely correct in the weight of your argument. The point of such a price is nothing to do with anything other than recycling old peoples' savings - principally their housing equity - as quickly as possible into the nation's coffers leaving state provision to take up the miserable slack at life's end. It is quite a savage and wicked mechanism, and a really, really fucking horrible indictment of us all that we treat people like that.
It is, indeed, a fiendish conundrum, one which goes, so far, unnoticed. Whilst QE and low interest rates enable the spiv to ransack the nation, they mean that smaller depositors earn nothing, the very opposite of what Capitalism's founding, joint-stock company principle enabled, not to mention that such stocks which are traded are conducted via micro-second, speculative and crooked insider dealing of vast blocks of MickyMouse Money siphoned, by organised crime, from pension funds and derived from the asset stripping of publicly-owned utilities.Those on fixed, retirement income can earn little or nothing from the market; those who have done as they were told and paid two or three times its worth for their home must now forfeit its worth in order to be bullied and tormented until death by minimum-waged Central European aliens, employed by US spivs who have filth like Mickey Fallon on their boards, the private care home sector, as we call these felons. Why save? You can enjoy cruelty, spite and neglect in your last years for nothing.
As for price/cost, the local authority-run homes to which I refer, because of the unexpectedly long lifespans of their residents, and the kick-in of free-to-client service, make no profit; the required forfeiture of one's home, therefore, is but vindictive window dressing.
...catalysed a way of thinking in many of us, as nowhere else could have done. QED, mr tdg, thus it is demonstrated.
mr mike says the same thing, incidentally.
I intend no blanket insult, it is just that for every Cantabrian dyers garden or world traveller or gentle poet, I have met a score of braying arseholes, plundering the public purse, superscilious, arrogant, conceited, graceless and worst of all, unpardonably stupid.
It is the thing that makes me despair above all, the casual disregard of the old and weak in our society. Of course, we despise in the New Age of Fitness, both ends of the span: the disposable intra-uterine inconveniences and the incontinent, bewildered ones. Markers of how civilised we have become.
Beneath even that, however, the real desperation arises when one beholds the evacuation of self that occurs in so many of the elderly now, the loss of awareness and the hopeless shuffling around that emptiness. Let's not, as they say, go there.
No matter how shabbily we treat the old, saying to them as we do, Look, lessbeclear, you're lucky to be alive you know, at your age, cough up, the arithmetic, or the math, as we must now say, forbids the continuation of even this niggardly, cheapskate level of care. I had hoped, not very optimistically, that Corbyn or some of his smug, gobby, macho lieutenants would have voiced what I have said above and elsewhere, that taxes must rise significantly, no ifs, no prevarication, taxes must rise and borders must be secured, either that or we endure anarchy and total Ruin.
The casual slaughter of the unborn inconvenience and the hasty discarding of the elderly nuisance reveal the filthy, diseased heart of LibLabConSNP party politics, each outdoing the other in the five yearly festival of competitive promising, none of them dipping a toe in the waters of realistic taxation.
I was kind-of OK with mixed-economy, regulated capitalism, with the idea that crucially important services were publicly/owned and run through equitable taxation but we no longer have even that economic system but brigandage fast approaching feudalism, as illustrated by the expensively-acquired home ownership scam being mere serfdom, a tenancy to be reliquished and requisitioned by the liege lord that he may herd you into a barn, there to die, as quickly as possible, or that, better still, the likes of Filth's courtier, Charlie Falconer urge upon you self slaughter, should you grow confused or incontinent.
Oh, the hard times of England, where merely to live is to be burdensome.
"Mr ishmeal
... that taxes must rise significantly, no ifs, no prevarication, taxes must rise and borders must be secured, either that or we endure anarchy and total Ruin."
I think you are right if applied to those who are currently "making money" as opposed to "earning money". As I was trying to point out above Money only has a real value if it is earned.
Yes, m alphons, I have often made that distinction, but while I agree that the wealthy must be taxed proportionately and compulsorily, so too must we all, those who can reasonably be taxed. I see no other way, presently, for us to properly value and care for each othet and ourselves. We are all in this together is just an abbreviation for From each, according to his ability, to each according to his needs, which itself, stems from where we came in, with the Sermon on the Mount, and the feeding of the many, by the few.
No, no and thrice no. Taxation is theft. If it wasn't for taxes the arseholes which you, my dear sir, constantly reveal in the most unarguable manner, wouldn't exist. They are the human equivalent of assassin bugs in an ants' nest which disguise themselves with corpses and prey on the colony.
If you needed a pound or two I would gladly send it. If you sent a costumed armed man to my house and demanded it at gunpoint you would also get it. But there would be no value and no care. It's funny how we chip in for the RNLI despite the fact that most of us don't go to sea, or know anyone who does, for the simple reason that it's a good thing to do. Do you remember the Dr Barnardo's boxes we used to get from school, which filled up with loose change on the mantelpiece? Didn't see a law, or a taxman, but yet they filled up.
We don't need to be taxed to help other people. Taxes fund the state, and the state is not our friend. Look at the bastards who run it. Do you trust them with your money?
As for Jesus, he was killed because he foresaw a method by which people could provide for each other without a State. If all men are brothers why - for instance - would you need a man's ID (which requires a payment to the state) and Customs clearance (via payment to the state) to give a man some freight? The very phrase "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" shows that if you use the monetary system as authorised, then you have to pay the author(ities).
One last thing - I remember you wrote about someone who wanted to get paid in cash to avoid being taxed and you told him to eff off. In my world I only pay tradesmen in cash in the expectation that they won't declare it. Funny to think that a man who's earned something should be able to keep it, all of it, because it isn't HMRC who's gone up onto the roof, or fixed a recalcitrant engine. Therefore Inland Revenue or whoever get fuck all because they've done fuck all.
This is a one bottle rant and now I'm going to bed. I paid tax on the wine to people who didn't make it, and VAT on the bed to non-carpenters. But they can't charge me for falling asleep.
NB I don't agree with you on this, but it doesn't mean I don't like you.
-richard
And I like you, too, mr richard, and was hoping to rouse your sleeping tax avoider.
In no particular order, because I have been in airports all day, I think it is a fucking outrage that a maritime nation suffers itself to have charitable status maritime rescue; to have that wretched, Edwardian, patronising, match-girl Poppy Appeal, year-in, year-out, whilst lavishing pensions and homes and security upon those who keep themselves and their sons far from Harm's way. How dare they start wars and expect charity to support the detritus? I dunno hiw long that fucking Children in Need has been runnin but a fucking fence post'd have figured out by now that there is something very wrong with a fifth biggest economy nation needing to have a permanent charity jamboree in order to deliver its children from evil.
As for cash in hand merchants, why the fuck shouldn't they pay tax? They drive here on roads, their brats go to school, they use the hospitals, why the fuck should I pay them for their work AND pay for the services which they use, so's they don't have to? No difference to me if it's Starbucks or the window cleaner, they're all shit-eating bastards, shouldn't be in the lifeboat.
And as for the state, the state is not Junky George Osborne, nor is it the crooks who head HMRC, all of whom need a quick rub-down with a housebrick of Wrath, and then hanging up by the neck off Tower Bridge. That those currently in charge are vermin doed not mean that we should .abandon the project of living together in s civilsed fashion.
I think the following my cause money to be seen for what it is. Very few people think about what it is. and until the world recognises what it is and values it as that, and uses it only for its primary purpose I see no escape from present chaos.
"There is a lot of talk, by a lot of people, about money. Unfortunately most of them do not have the slightest idea what money is. Most of them view it as something that comes out of a bank, whereas it is actually something that is, sometimes, put into a bank for safe keeping.
At its most basic a piece of money is a token exchanged for a quantity of energy. This token can then be exchanged for another portion of energy when needed. Prior to the introduction of money (by whom, and when, is not at this point important) the means of exchanging energy was by barter.
Now energy is a transitory commodity, so how was it packaged in order to exchange it?
In the DBM (Days Before Money) everyone grew their own produce and were self sufficient in virtually every way, but of course it was often the case that when, for example, a sheep was slaughtered, there was too much meat for consumption just at that precise time (and to wait for someone to invent the ‘fridge would have meant that the mutton would “go off”) so it made sense to swap some of it, with Alf down the road, for maybe half a dozen turnips and a bit of honey.
The only thing that was involved in breeding and rearing that sheep was energy. It had been conceived in the normal way by the interaction of one the family’s ewes with the family ram, or perhaps a neighbours ram (in exchange for a couple of cabbages), and it had been delivered by the family shepherd and raised on the family land. It had fed on hay, during the winter months, that had been gathered by the family, from the family lands or from the common. All that had gone into it was family energy. (Some of that energy had also gone into shearing it during the summer, and turning the resultant wool into clothing.)
Similarly Alf had sown some turnip seed on his family land. This seed had been saved from last year’s crop, by the simple expedient of letting one or two good healthy turnips run to seed. The land had been cultivated by ploughing, using the family’s home bred oxen and rough home made plough. The honey may have been gathered ‘from the wild’ or may have been produced by Alf’s family “bee herd”!
The basis of this transaction was simply an exchange of “packets of energy”. The energy used in the production of the goods and stored therein.
This exchange of packets of energy was not restricted simply to food. Over the centuries (millennia really) it would include pieces of flint worked into tools, pieces of bone and horn similarly worked. Later on metal ores would be dug up and made into tools and then exchanged for foodstuffs. What ever it was that was bartered it was, in reality, an exchange of energy, of work.
Of course the world changes and develops and eventually, somewhere along the line. tokens, representing the expended energy, were devised, and these tokens were very beneficial. Now it became unnecessary to go out and kill a sheep if you just happen to fancy a turnip or some honey. Instead. you simply used some of the tokens you received in exchange for that last basket of poultry. These tokens, or coinage, also made markets and bazaars possible. You could now take all your surplus sheep to market and come home with a pocket full of tokens and this would enable you to go back again each week to buy just one fresh turnip and maybe a fresh cabbage, should you feel that way.
---------------------------
The markets and bazaars did another thing however. They presented, to the world's ever present thieves, a better and much more lucrative way of acquiring for themselves the packets of energy produced by others."
I will sleep on that, m alphons - been a long, hard airports day - and will come back tomorrow.
"As for cash in hand merchants, why the fuck shouldn't they pay tax? They drive here on roads, their brats go to school, they use the hospitals, why the fuck should I pay them for their work AND pay for the services which they use, so's they don't have to?"
This is a good question so let's see.
Roads are full of potholes, schools are pathetic, hospitals have you waiting two years for your knee to be fixed, or 24 hours in a corridor if it's hanging off.
Private toll roads (in France, where I used them) are smooth and fast. Private health care, which my wife had to pay for due to the inordinate wait for NHS, is smooth and fast. Presumably private tutelage would follow the pattern; if the product is shit, no-one gets paid. That's the problem with tax-funded things, it isn't their money so they waste it and they don't get sacked if they're shite.
A colleague of mine who's only 33 has paid nearly 40K in taxes in his relatively short working life. There's the cash for private medical insurance and the means of investing into a fund to educate his children if he ever has any, and the few coins necessary per day to pay to use a toll-system road. Note that he then wouldn't be paying for other people's illnesses or other people's brats' education.
Why the fuck should you pay taxes?
Simple, because if you don't then you'll be jailed. That's why everyone pays.
You can get a tax-free bicycle for work; how many cyclists are so saddened that the portion of the bike's cost - tax - that they've saved hasn't gone to the Government that they get their cheque-books out to pay HMRC? Fucking none, because anyone who throws money at the Government is a lunatic. You know what they're like more than most. Are they the types to be trusted with other people's money?
And that's why I pay cash in hand, because if the worker declares his payment and pays tax, that's his business. But he is operating according to his belief. Unlike the collection plate at church there is a gun in your ribs, but if he wants to pretend it isn't there, and that the money will be used for anything other than to pay a fraction of the interest on spiralling debt, well and good.
But what if he doesn't have a belief? Instead he realises (note the word) that, having done the work, he has more claim to payment than someone who has done nothing except make a pronouncement, backed by a genuine threat, that some of that money must be handed over.
I would rather keep all my earnings, which are extremely modest, and pay my own way. It's not right to have others pay for me instead of themselves and vice versa. I can then do unto others (since you think taxes are relevant to TSOTM) because I want to. Where's your own moral victory in being forced to be good, even assuming that taxes are used to help the poor.
My money should go where I want or need it to go, not where somebody else decides.
-richard
The markets and bazaars did another thing however. They presented, to the world's ever present thieves, a better and much more lucrative way of acquiring for themselves the packets of energy produced by others.
They simply waited until the man who had just sold his produce was on his way home and then simply “relieved” him of it, in some lonesome spot.
Help eventually arrived, however, because in all these market towns were money changers, necessary for the provision of small change for the purveyors of sweet meats and trinkets etc. and for “foreign dealers”. These money changers were quick to realise that they could protect the seller’s/merchant’s gold/money until his next visit to market, in their strong rooms, and they could charge him a nominal sum for doing this. So as time went by all the big sellers/merchants kept the bulk of their wealth in the strong rooms in town, and only took home with them just what they needed until next market, which was very little. Suddenly we have the start of banking. Which is, in effect, is a series of various repositories, for the safe keeping of tokens for energy, work done.
There is one story in the New Testament that tells of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple. Now I am a sceptic agnostic atheist, but, the fact that this story appeared at all says something about the views of the writer of this tale, whosoever he happened to be. There must have been some sort of serious financial problem associated with these money changers some time before 250 AD.
Could it have been that they were in effect parasites, using the packets of energy of others for their own ends?
-------------------------------
As the world has moved on, over the last few centuries, the link between energy/work/effort and money has been gradually diminished to the point where today there are countless thousands who are totally divorced from this concept, but the connection is still exactly what is has been since the first barter took place.
All the world’s raw materials, the starting point of all production, still cost nothing. The cost is in the human energy of getting that material, be it mining the ore, extracting the oil, breeding and feeding the animals, chopping down/growing the trees, and then processing and converting all that material into processing machines or products.
The accountants will tell us that production costs are divided into three categories, labour, raw materials and overheads. But will refuse to accept that it is all human effort, human energy, that give rise to every one of those three. ( I will concede that there are things that are added to the “Overheads” which are not human energy, like the chairman’s bonus and the penthouse for his mistress, but then they are totally out of order on any balance sheet under any heading!) Quite a large quantity of the energy is not spent hewing coal or labouring in the grunge foundry but is spent in ancillary activities connected with successfully getting the product to the consumer, but it is nevertheless “productive effort”.
The result of his effort furnishes the energy provider with what is these days called “Purchasing power” to enable that individual to provide, for himself and his dependants, the necessities of life. Or more correctly should do so. Unfortunately so blinkered has most of the world become that the worker and the consumer are seen as two distinct species of animal, whereas they are both the same one. They are in fact two parts of that indivisible Earthly Trinity, The Worker, The Consumer and The Voter.
In the 70s there was a big movement, emanating in the main from the American business colleges, to reduce production costs, and hence increase profits, by cutting out labour as much as possible. Vast sums of money were spent on new machinery, most of it borrowed, to be repaid over ten years, just to reduce the labour force, and the accountants pronouncethed it good.
But your private, or more accurately termed, selective medicine only works in the pre-existing taxpayer-funded infrastructure by the use of techniques researched and developed largely at public expense, with patients brought to their current level of health by the NHS, since childhood. and with those trained at public expense and is furhermore selective in whom it treats, rather like the so-called public schools. I would close them both down in a heartbeat and confiscate their holdings, their pension funds and their physical assets, they are like something from the reign of the fucking Tudors. Just try having a chronic illness and getting private health care insurance, not that one would.
As I said, and what underpins these commentaries, is that just because those who have, almost for ever, suborned the idea of the collective state, to their own purpose and pocket, is no reason for us to abandon the principle of risk being shared, in utmost good faith.
Yes, I agree with all of that, m alphons. Adam Smith described Barter as reliant upon a Coincidence of Wants, and therefore inefficient, that money - or more acurately, survival tokens - was the logical successor. That some have- and are permitted to have - an insatiable appetite for infinitely more survival tickets than they need, in any imaginable circumstances, to survive is a death sentence to those who are thus denied any survival tickets, and to the planet, which simply cannot be operated as though it was a spivs' commodity market. That so few can imagine a future history, a world Beyond Money, is unsurprising, their ancestors said the same thing about slavery and feudalism.
Symbiosis at the start, maybe, but it isn't now. It's parasitism and the flea's bigger than the dog.
-richard
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