The Church and Easter

The odd thing about the Church is that every Easter it has a great opportunity to 'sell' itself to packed pews with the AIM of getting us to change from being , High Day worshippers only, to  becoming more regular members of the congregation and every year the it blows it.  

How many times over the last eighteen years have I - remembering Jesus's words- suffer the little children to come unto me - and forbid them not -  taken my extended brood to Church and had my spiritual contemplation ruined - not to mention those of quite a lot of the congregation as well - by my vain efforts to keep my children under some sort of control.  And how often, during some tedious part of the service, have I turned to my Bible and refreshed my memory with words of Jesus - who said;

 But when you pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do; for they think they will be heard by their much speaking . Be ye not therefore like unto them ; after this manner therefore pray ye.  And he forthwith taught his disciples the Lords Prayer .     

Now of course the Church, in it's wisdom, totally ignores Jesus's advice and your average church service is stuffed full of 'vain repetitions' not to mention 'much speaking' with the result that you are lucky, at Easter, to get out in under an hour and a quarter and vow not to put in another appearance till Christmas.

   

George Galloway

Well hurrah for the voters of West Bradford. Now I don't suppose George Galloway and I would agree on much politically but at least he is a man with convictions, character, a sense of humour and enjoys a cigar. So, in other words, there is a lot of good in the man and he is a vast improvement on most MP's, on both sides of the House of Commons, who seem to believe in nothing at all apart from their pathetic careers.

Let's hope the election of George is not a one off but the start of a rebellion by the electorate against our anodyne political leaders of all hues and we will see more upsets in by elections to come -not to mention of course the Euro Elections when I am backing UKIP to sweep the board and give Cameron a very bloody nose.  

Mrs Assad

There was a picture of Mrs Assad with her husband in the newspaper yesterday and very lovely she looked too. Not just good looking, but intelligent as well, judging by the copies of her emails released by a hacker  Of course she is a 'hate figure' for our 'right on' friends in our media and government but they ought to pause and think -where else in the Arab world can a woman be publicly photographed standing by her husband, in a dress with bare arms and a big smile on her face?  Certainly not in Saudi Arabia which, of course, is backing the Sunni rebels. Next to the picture there was another photograph of a pretty girl who is allegedly: 'a close adviser to Mr. Assad and who advises him how to present his brutal crackdown to the media in a positive light.'  Again I can't help wondering where else in the Middle East could a woman become head of media relations? 

Now I don't know what the future holds for Syria but if I was Syrian woman I know who I would be hoping would win the current Civil War, Mr Assad.  Meanwhile if Mr. Cameron is really so keen on democracy why doesn't he give the people of this country the chance to vote on - say - immigration - the continuing membership of the EU - or reform of that  Lawyers benefit- the  Human Rights Act - to name but three issues which if put to the people of this country would almost certainly produce results which go against what the cosy liberal London consensus believes in. A consensus which is every bit as Dictatorial in its way as that of Mr. Assad and has ruled this country ever since Margaret Thatcher left office.

Red Meat is Good for YOu

A fatuous body called the Harvard School of Medicine has come up with the finding that - according to my newspaper-  eating steak is bad for you - Wow! Not only that but that if we were to cut the amount of red meat we eat to only 42 gm a day (the equivalent of one steak a week) almost one in ten early deaths in men could be prevented. Wow again. Obviously-  if these findings had a grain of truth in them -there would be no Argentinians alive over the age of sixty as, for those of you who don't know, Argentinians are the world champions of red meat eaters consuming 55 kg per head per year - yes that is twenty times the amount the pathetic Harvard Medicine School boffins think is good for you- Twenty times! right so -obviously -there can't be many hale and hearty Argentinians around can there? Oddly there can. The average Argentinian male lives to 73.1 years, OK that is less than our 78.4 years but that discrepancy can easily be explained by the difference in GDP per person and the health care spend. /   

The same cretinous report also waxes lyrical about the dangers of eating smoked meats like bacon or scoffing processed meats like sausages and salami - so - once again -why are there so many Germans around nicking all the sun loungers when I am on holiday?  According to Dr Hu -co author of the report - they should all be dead well before they get to the age when they can afford to go on holiday because- as we all know - those of us anyway who have had the misfortune to taste German culinary efforts -  their entire life revolves round eating sausages and processed meats but - actually - the average German males lives 77.82 years, only six months less than your average Brit!

Lastly of course life is not about living for ever but about having fun and enjoying the good things that God has given us. So just remember when next time you wife tries to tempt you with a plate of ghastly spaghetti that the average Italian male only lives six months longer than the average Brit - but if the price of that extra six months is a lifetime of eating pasta pap then frankly - fuck it - eat red meat and have fun.

Francis Maude - a Nasty Tory

Francis Maude - a Minister in this weird government of 'all talents' we are currently afflicted with - maintains that the Tory party will always be seen as the 'nasty 'party unless it backs gay marriage, unmarried couples and does more to attract ethnic minority supporters. Now -there is a technical problem here- i.e. the nasty truth is that many ethnic minorities don't hold with Mr Maude's 'right on' attitude to gay rights or unmarried mothers, let alone gay marriage and, in fact, quite a few of these ethnic minorities consider gay anything to be a crime best punished by a particular gruesome and prolonged death while unmarried mothers are normally buried up to their neck in sand before everyone throws has fun throwing stones.  These inconvenient facts must cause any Conservative member keen to be seen to be a 'right on modern conservative' a problem. Does he embrace evangelical Nigerian Christians for example or the gay fascist marriage party?  Perhaps Mr. Maude could give us guidance on this issue.

Mr Maude's advocacy of gay marriage though has thrown up a another problem. By trying to placate one lobby he and David Cameron have unwittingly stirred up that sleeping giant, the Roman Catholic church and it's million UK members, not to mention the evangelical wing of the Church of England. The bad news for Mr Maude is that the issue of Gay marriage is not, as I suspect he and David Cameron thought, a non controversial affair, but is a highly controversial affair and - here is the irony - in their efforts to be seen as 'non nasty tories' Mr Maude and Mr Cameron have become 'very nasty tories' for those members of the Catholic Church and Church of England who oppose gay marriage as a matter of principle.          

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Syria

I just wonder whether Mr Assad is such a bad bloke as he is portrayed in the press and I just wonder how long it would be, if the 'good guys' won, before we were wishing he was still around running the show.  It is all very well Cameron and the rest of the chattering classes getting their knickers in a twist about the death of a British journalist and some civilians in Homs but frankly this is what happens in a Civil war and, if one side chooses to fight it out in a City, then civilians will get killed.  It is a moot point incidentally whether the Syrian army should get the blame for the civilian casualties, I would have thought the rebels, who deliberately chose to fight their battle in a populated urban environment, are the real guilty party.

Still let's assume the rebels end up winning  it is odds on near certainty that the government which follows will make his regime look like a nursery school.  Why? Because this is the history of virtually every revolution, especially a revolution which is supported by the likes of Cameron, the Sunday Times, the Guardian et al, in other words by people whose chief distinguishing characteristic is a total lack of knowledge of history and a pathetic belief that all everyone wants is to live in a Western Democracy and respect each others human rights.   Well the bad news is that, based on the track record of 'liberal' revolutions, the last thing the eventual winners do is respect any ones human rights.

So just going back in history we will start off with the overthrow of that unspeakable tyrant, King Charles I.  Oddly the Civil war is still mistakenly taught in our schools as a sort of 'war of liberation' by the downtrodden masses against a tyrannical king which of course it was not.  The end result was the abolition of Parliament and the imposition of a military dictatorship. Moving on to the French Revolution, much supported by the liberal intelligentsia both here and in France, the benign and rather incompetent reign of Louis XVI was very soon replaced by the Reign of Terror, and the rule of extremists.  The same of course happened in the Russian Revolution and, nearer our time with the over throw of the Shah of Iran, widely welcomed by all 'right thinking people' in the BBC and in most of the press - the Guardian of course being particularly enthusiastic. The end result is that in Iran woman caught in adultery are routinely stoned to death, homosexuals are strung up and everyone lives in fear of the religious police. 

A friends of  son (an adventurous boy) is just back from a visit to Syria and gives a very different picture of what is happening in that country than that provided by our biased media.  In particular he tells me of the fear of the minority Christian population about what their future would be if the rebels where to win.  Assad's Syria  is tolerant of minorities and allowes women great freedom, aspects you would have thought would appeal to our chattering classes. So why are they so anxious that Mr Assad's regime would be toppled and replaced by rebels supported by those known tolerant regimes like the Saudis and, I almost forgot, Al Queda?             

 





 

universities

I am not sure that the appointment of the ghastly Les Ebdon as Gauliter in charge of the 'Fair Access ( a oxymoron if ever there was one) QUANGO is going to make a lot of difference in the long run.  I say that because an increasing number of the young and their parents are starting to realise that a University education is not all it is cracked up to be. Sure you spend three years drinking too much alcohol, shagging around and, quite probably, end up shacked up with the girl who will one day be your wife, but with tuition fees of £9,000 a year plus another £10,000 for lodgings and living allowance actually it is beginning to look a tad expensive especially as a 2:1 no longer guarantees you a job while a 2:2 is frankly worth a bucket of the proverbial.   Why is this? Well perhaps because most of those who are sitting behind the desk interviewing potential employees now are themselves products of the University system and know what most degrees are worth - i..e. fuck all - a big change from say only ten years ago when the chances were that the guy doing the interviewing hadn't been to University and thus thought it meant that you were intelligent and hard working  

The alternative to University is of course the University of Life.  Now as a graduate of this University with first Class Honours I have always upheld its merits not least because whenever I read about an entrepreneur who has made millions by setting up his own business the phrase -'left school at sixteen' - normally crops up while the phrase 'got a double first at Oxford' hardly ever does.  In fact you could make a very good case that the best thing you could do to get the economy going would be to demolish most of the Universities  and let the young take their chance in the big wide world as they used to when Britain was great.