The Meek shall Inherit a World of Idiots

We were told that the meek will inherit the world, but little was said about just what sort of world that would be. We are well on the way to an Idiotic one, judging by the talk in the Tavern.

I could dine out on stories of Fathers for a start. The idiotic situations they encounter in our Courts leaves a sane mind reeling. But one really needs a Psychiatrist to spell that out. He has the proper credentials. Like wot I have.

And one other such well credentialed and experienced 'shrink' was in the P&B last night to chew the fat and swap stories with me. Patient confidentialities aside we have much in common and many tales which are best told only in the Snug with the doors closed.

Dr Daniels. AKA, Theodore Dalrymple is a man I admire.

The good Dr has retired now. He has not been thinking of following my example and opening a Tavern, fortunately, but continues to write books. He was musing on the Idiocy of our modern world and offered a few vignettes about France. It could have been anywhere.

"I Have Seen the Future", he said, "and it is Idiocy"

http://takimag.com/article/i_have_seen_the_future_and_it_is_idiocy_theodore_dalrymple#axzz2kULOzSxm
 

He explained.

 Yesterday morning, as I was sitting in the flat on Paris that I have rented for a time quietly finishing my latest book, Murderers I Have Known (and I have known quite a few), a furious row broke out in the street six floors below.  

I went out onto the terrace—the flat is on the building’s top floor—to see what was going on. There were several other equally curious people standing on their balconies on both sides of the street. 

 A little knot of young black men, with two or three girls among them, was having a furious row. It was obvious that they were in earnest, though goodness knows about what, as I could not make out any words. I was like a dog; I went by the tone of their voices. 

 One of the young men struck another and he fell, his face covered in blood. The man who had struck him kicked him with full force and got down on him to punch him as hard as he could. He got in several very hard blows before some others hauled him off. If he had not been hauled off, I think he would have beaten him to death.  

 

I was very glad that neither of the two, the beater and the beaten, had a gun, for I am sure that in their heightened state of emotion, whatever it was about, one of them would have used a gun to kill.  

Of course, there will be those who say that if each of them had thought the other had a gun, they would not have fought in the first place. 

 It was strange to see cars crawl by this scene, the drivers obviously seeing what was going on but doing nothing about it. Some passers-by passed by and others tried to intervene. More than one called the police. 

 

 Oddly enough, once the man had been hauled off his prostrate associate (former friend? long-time enemy?), the group reformed and went up the street, still arguing furiously. A couple of shopkeepers came out to tell them to calm down, as the frightening fury was presumably bad for trade. 

 This all continued for several minutes.  

The police never came.    

They probably had other things to do. 

 As it happens, their slowness to react (infinite slowness, in fact, since they did not react at all), contrasted oddly with an experience I had the previous Sunday.  

A couple of American filmmakers came to Paris to interview me—it always surprises me that anybody would take so much trouble to interview anybody, let alone me—and decided that the little park opposite my flat, with a pretty little bandstand, would be a good place to do so.  

They set up the camera, but a few seconds later, before they could ask me a single question, a municipal policeman arrived. They were not allowed to film here without a permit from the mairie of the arrondissement, he said.  

I explained that these were Americans, come all the way from Texas expressly to interview me. He, a very pleasant and polite man of African origin, phoned his chief to see whether an exception could be made. As I suspected, it could not. 

 I told the film crew that we should make no fuss; the man was only doing his job, silly as that job might be.  

As it happens there were several drunks in another part of the park making aggressive-sounding noises and breaking bottles, but them he did not approach, perhaps wisely, as they were several and he was only one.  

He thought he would have more luck with someone wearing a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers as I was.  

We found a café willing to accommodate us. 

 The contrast between the authorities’ alacrity on one hand in preventing innocent filming for a matter of a few minutes (the policeman said authorization was necessary because it might cause a disturbance, and, being kind, I refrained from laughing), and on the other their slow response to a nasty incident that might have ended in murder, was emblematic of the modern state’s capacity to get everything exactly the wrong way around, to ascribe importance to trivia and to ignore the important.  

There are, of course, many more employment opportunities in trivia, since there is much more that is trivial in the world than is important. 

 **Being kind, I refrained from laughing**

 France is not unique in this respect, or even the worst example I know.  

In London I once parked outside a hotel where I proposed to stay.  

Parking was forbidden outside, but I stopped only to take my baggage inside. I received a parking ticket within sixty seconds, a miracle of efficiency (I genuinely admired it in a way), though it was perfectly obvious from my car’s open doors that I did not propose to stay long and was only taking my luggage into the hotel.  

But on another occasion when my wife telephoned the police to inform them that youths were committing arson in our front garden before her very eyes, they had no time to attend to it. A more senior officer, however, did find the time a quarter of an hour later to complain to my wife that she had wasted police time by complaining in the first place. 

 It often seems, then, as if modern state authorities live in a looking-glass world:

What normal people regard as important is for them of no importance, while what they regard as of supreme importance normal people regard as of no importance.  

For them the respectable are suspect and the suspect respectable.  

A tweed jacket is a sign of menace, while a broken bottle is a sign of harmless intent. 

 One must not exaggerate the degree to which official idiocy impinges on our lives.  

The exaggeration of misery is one of the royal roads to political disaster.  

Still, I have seen the future, and it is idiocy.

I raised a glass to that observation.

Pax Dei. You know it makes sense.

Uncle Bulgaria - the Pervert Puppet Exposed

Shocking revelations sent everyone in the UK Room to their rooms to check in the back of cupboards for skeletons .

I cannot say more at this point. The puppets of the N$A and Shockland Yard are buggering the phones.

 

 

 Great Uncle Bulgaria thought he had got away with it by dying but he is to be exhumed from the back of his cupboard and hanged after a fair trial complete with uncorroborated accusations,  by a jury of middle-aged women.

 

Thanks go to Anna Raccoon. And a fine drink of Distinction too.

 

http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/operation-it-could-be-yewtree/

 

 

Next week's Shock expose: Germaine Greer - The Real Dr Who: Named as Universal Patriarchal Oppressor of Womyn.

Remember.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.

WAR

 What a waste.

One Third of the marriageable men of Great Britain died or were maimed in WW1. Their 'quality of life', as the PC crowd would say, was ruined.


War is sometimes brought to us and we cannot but engage.



 Whenever we lose our Integrity, our Dignity, Truth, Freedom to live and say what is Right we should remember them.

 When ever we choose the wrong path instead of the right one, we should remember the waste of their efforts to save our homes and loved-ones.

 When we give in to anger and hatred, we should think of just what was in the enemy that killed those Grand-fathers of ours, those husbands and sons, that also lies within ourselves, and will one day kill other good men; perhaps ourselves.

 When we look out over the society we have today, with its desire to kill even those who have yet to take their first breath, we ought to bring to mind that it might have been a quite different society today had not so many men been taken from the gene pool in WW1; and what our society today is doing to the society of tomorrow.

Remembrance too of  Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, a stretcher bearer, decorated by every nation participating in the war, for his selfless courage and compassion for all the wounded he rescued regardless of uniform.



Pax Dei Vobiscum

Education Elephant in the Room

It never ceases to amaze. There is an elephant sitting in most 'public' rooms that go deliberately unseen. All from the same herd. Wherever one looks in Public Policy, there it is. But no-one wants to mention the turd-pile despite the awful smell. Education is one such place.

The subject crops up in the many Tavern bars. This time it was in regard to education.

Everyone in western countries have been through the school system. The one noticeable fact about it, very few mention. They consider so many other factors but ignore the one.  It is as though they have all been schooled at Fawltey Towers. Don't mention the W ... wait for it.....

The Australian newspaper was on about the parlous state of education and failed to give it a passing glance.

Learning the hard lessons of failed experimentation

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/learning-the-hard-lessons-of-failed-experimentation/story-e6frg71x1226742738288#sthash.GhDPBYNL.dpuf 

DISMAYED by their children's indifferent literacy and numeracy skills and limited historical, geographical and scientific knowledge, many parents will not be surprised by today's revelation that a doubling of education funding over the past 20 years has not improved education standards.  

As national education correspondent Justine Ferrari writes, while school funding has doubled in real terms since 1995 to  

$40 billion a year,  

Australian students' results in international and national tests have flat-lined or fallen.  

Yet, despite the failure of smaller class sizes, student laptops and better buildings to improve student achievement, educators and politicians continue investing in them year after year.  

Working with his state colleagues and the non-government sector, Education Minister Christopher Pyne has no alternative but to pursue a sharp break from current patterns. 

Not that he will of course.

 
For an insider's view of the malaise that has progressively sucked quality, rigour, purpose and discipline from many schools, readers will relate to the insights of Michael Hewitson, an experienced maths/science teacher and former principal from South Australia, whose book How Will our Children Learn? (Connor Court) is reported in Inquirer today by associate editor Chris Kenny.  

It speaks volumes that Trinity College, a low-fee school founded by Hewitson in 1985 at Gawler, a dusty, working-class community north of Adelaide, grew into one of Australia's largest and most in-demand schools, with 3500 students within 15 years.  

After it started with only the most basic facilities, much of its development occurred with just 65 per cent of the money, per child, of a state school. 

The issues on which Mr Hewitson focuses in his book provide a useful guide for education reform. 

I wish. So may you.  But more money will be forthcoming; you can bet on that and get a better  return on it

He covered the importance of parental choice in education, the advantages of state schools being allowed greater independence and reporting to local school boards or councils rather than government bureaucracies, school governance, student discipline, teacher quality and commitment, streaming of students according to ability in some subjects and the importance of making the core curriculum - English, spelling, grammar and writing, number skills and maths - a priority.  

Like other experienced educators, Mr Hewitson also advocated extending the school day to cater for cultural and sporting activities.  

Nor should the anecdotal evidence in the book about the value of phonics in teaching reading, even to the most disadvantaged students, be overlooked. Unfortunately, although the benefits of phonics, in tandem with vocabulary work, comprehension and storytelling, have been proven repeatedly in empirical studies, the "whole language" system of teaching reading still prevails in many schools and university teaching programs.  

Importantly for students from less affluent backgrounds, Mr Hewitson's experience in resolving difficult disciplinary issues, at Trinity and as a young teacher with classes of 45 students at Whyalla, reflected the findings of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development research reported last week.  

Like the OECD number crunchers who surveyed the impact of rowdy classrooms on student achievement around the world, Trinity College parents, students and teachers found well-managed classrooms raised students' opportunities by boosting their chances of gaining access to their preferred tertiary courses. 

After the inherent wastage of the $16bn school building program and an upsurge of recurrent funding under the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments to little avail, the national interest demands Mr Pyne, his state counterparts and universities in charge of teacher education move on from the flawed education theories that have short-changed two generations of Australian students. Poor outcomes tend to hurt disadvantaged students more.  

The Education Revolution.

But it is also a serious concern the achievements of the top 25 per cent of students appear to have stagnated, a trend pinpointed in a recent study of 37,000 students from all sectors in Victoria and in international testing. 

Is this any wonder. The top 25 % used to be composed mainly of boys. Then the great, expensive fad came to raise the standards of girls. Wholly admirable in intent, but at the deliberate marginalizing of boys in practice. And why?

Don't mention the W...

Some states have already freed up many schools from centralised departmental control and allow principals autonomy in hiring and firing staff and setting their spending priorities.  

Injecting intellectual rigour and balance and removing postmodern and pop-cultural fads from the curriculum is also essential. As the Gonski funding process unfolds, however, the main challenge for the commonwealth and states is to lift the status and expertise of the teaching profession, starting with academic entry standards for school leavers aspiring to teach.  

And who have those school-leavers who aspire to teach been, predominantly, over the past 20 or 30 years?  Those with almost the lowest scores in their all-too easy 'courses'.  Don't mention the W....

Effective in-service programs for teachers to improve classroom practices and more effective leadership training for principals would also have a direct bearing on school performances. Teaching quality is the main focus of high-performing East Asian school systems, and its value was underlined by Mr Hewitson in his account of a band of dedicated teachers. 

Parents know good schools or bad schools when they find them, regardless of sector, postcode, class sizes or facilities. Business as usual, with its prevailing mediocrity, is no longer acceptable. Until teachers' unions and some academics show a more mature understanding of the teaching profession and the needs of students, their continuing demands for smaller classes and more funding will render them irrelevant in one of Australia's most important social debates.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/learning-the-hard-lessons-of-failed-experimentation/story-e6frg71x-1226742738288

So, here is the Premier Newspaper in Oz reviewing the sorry mess that education has become. It looks at the furniture; it can see the stains. It sniffs the air. It refuses point blank to actually mention the one clear fact.

OK, you waited for it. You could see it coming.

It is a Female Dominated Bizzo. 

 

But Don't mention the Women.

 

Teacher Quality and Commitment. That got a mention, but not the fact that 80% of the education workforce is female. The Nurturers.

 

Women are ideally suited to teaching. But that does not mean children are going to benefit.

 

Children haven't. And neither has society.

 

Quality, rigour, purpose and discipline. Remember reading that above? 

 

What do we have instead? Nurturing.    'Equality'.   Special Programs to boost girls - begone difficult exams, bring on Google. Sex education !! - For 5 year olds !!!  Environmental hysterics - children of five told that they can 'Save the Planet' even before they can spell. 'Elf 'n' Safety - no running, no competing, NO FAILING.  Sunscreen 'n' Hats. Faux -sexual harassment and false accusation - ah, but that only for men, and for small boys who want to hold hands with the girls.

 

Most of the teachers actually have to read ahead in the textbooks because they are not on top of their subjects.

 

EVEN with 6th Graders.

 

The education system will NOT improve until at least 50% of teachers are men. It was in the men that one found the Quality, rigour, purpose and discipline.

 

But we all know why men do not go into teaching.

 

And that is never mentioned either.

 

 

 

Now you need a drink.


 

Mountains of Gold.

This one is for the sheer pleasure.

And a short visit to the Spirit Bar.

Does the Soul good.

That is dedicated to Josh; the Southern Gal's pilot Josh. He knows what it is like. Although perhaps not that spot in particular. It is the descent into Queenstown, New Zealand.

And here is a quiet view from upstairs in the Tavern. I ascend for this, frequently.

Pax Dei.

Women, Good : Men, Bad. Hmmmmm.

Occasionally the reality of 'people' breaks through the cant, even in the Tavern. Sometimes the nasty part of Humanity breaks through our comfortable illusions. Take 'Women' for example.
 
It is almost a Mantra in this current era that men are 'bad', formed as little boys from "slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails", as the old nursery rhyme went. But Women are 'good'; little girls are made from "sugar and spice and all things nice". 

He has little chance of connecting with girls in his lifetime.
But maybe he should steer clear of them anyway.

I guess girls get that 'head-start' on the niceness bizzo, at least in the minds of parents and observers.
 
But regardless of popular mythology, Feminist Myth-making and anti-male calumny, we are all a mixture of good response and bad response to the world around us. And we were taken today on a trip into the darker recesses of heart, mind and Soul that we rarely ever bother to look at; or have scrupulously avoided looking at for decades.
 

Sorry about this but here is the bad news.

Women can be just as evil as men.

 
This is not a journey into women-bashing. It is a grasping of reality, with significant evidence for the Prosecution.  Just as 'men-kind' as a sex has to confront its darker examples of evil, so does 'Women-kind'. And neither has a monopoly on kindness, or even a firm grasp.

This is not presented to Praise Good Men or Good Women, either, abundant as both are, but to 'balance'. And by the Lord Harry some balance is needed before society falls backward on its arse.
 
Lynn Joyce Hunter was in the Pin & Balloon Bar with a sharp and pointy spear to tell us some inconvenient truths about the ladies and to 'prick' those arses into a more upright posture.

Lynn

She came by to tell us about a book by Wendy Lower, who has 'studied', as Dr. Venkmann of the Ghostbusters  said.

Wendy busts a few ghosts too.

In “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” a nonfiction long-list contender for the 2013 National Book Award, Lower profiles 13 women who became Nazi killers and accomplices, and contends that these women are representative of hundreds of thousands of ordinary German women who  

“got away with with murder.”

These were ordinary secretaries, nurses and wives  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/10/18/hitlers-furies-ordinary-secretaries-nurses-and-wives/
 

Wearing military jackets with swastika armbands, goose-stepping in jackboots and barking “Heil Hitler!” — we all recognize murderous Nazis when we see them. Except when we don’t, claims historian Wendy Lower: Except when they wore starched white nurse caps or walked to secretarial jobs in stacked heels and pleated skirts.  

Except when “he” was a “she,”  

and she looked a lot like us.

I am impressed that both Wendy and Lynn both talked directly to Women. They are women doing what a man can rarely do and escape with his skin.

According to Lower, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, the half-million women who participated in the mass murders that took place during the years 1941-44 in the killing fields of the Nazi East — the occupied areas of present-day Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia  and Estonia — have been largely ignored by historians and the criminal justice system.  

Pieced together by Lower from survivor interviews and archival documents that became accessible for scholarly review only after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the accounts of these women in their roles as nurses, teachers, secretaries and SS wives illustrate how they participated in genocidal violence.

But why would so many Nazi criminals be overlooked until now, 70 years later?  

Lower describes a German postwar consciousness of closely guarded secrets, where evidence of wrongdoing was entombed as much in the repressed memories of the living as in the passing of the dead.  

Embedded in this culture of forgetting were abiding assumptions about the nature of womanhood and their role in society.  

These assumptions functioned as an interpretive bias, fostering perceptions of German women as mostly innocent hausfraus tending to hearth and home, while attributing more notorious acts of terror and sadism to female camp guards who were viewed as deviant, marginal perpetrators.

 Add to that rationale another reality. We have had a clear run for Feminism for the past 50 of those 70 years and those femi-nazis have been tremendously successful in denying female guilt about anything at all, even killing their own babies. 'Mostly innocent' women everywhere seem Hell-bent on justifying such a lot of female behaviour, even horrible, unjust, hateful acts committed daily.

Meanwhile those same 'mostly innocent women' calumnize men freely. Even in the class-room, increasingly dominated by female teachers busily AgitPropping our children:

Doris Lessing, herself hailed as a Feminist in the 70's has had her rose-glasses smashed by vicious feminists that came after her. She said on TV:

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.  

I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.   

This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing. 

 It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not. 

 The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests …

Lynn continued:

Lower’s book explores and challenges this gender bias, depicting Nazi women as immersed in the blood-soaked landscape of the “wild east,” where Jews and forced laborers were shot routinely in broad daylight, and where the foul odor of mass graves was the air they breathed.  

“Interaction with Jews and mass murder entered into these women’s everyday lives in unexpected but recurring ways,” Lower writes, describing the situation of young nurses who delivered lethal injections and of secretaries who typed up death orders.

The most chilling accounts in “Hitler’s Furies” are about the women whose violence was targeted at children.  

In unsparing detail, Lower recounts the viciousness of Johanna Altvater, a young secretary who threw one child after another to their deaths off a third-floor railing in a Jewish ghetto.  

Or Erna Petri, wife of an SS officer, who in a gruesome version of Hansel and Gretel fed six tattered Jewish children in her home before marching them to the pit of a nearby mass grave and shooting them one by one, execution-style.

If, as Lower argues,  

these were not sociopaths but ordinary women  

who didn’t exhibit violent tendencies either before or after the war, how do we make sense of their appalling participation in Nazi genocide?  

What do these women tell us about history, gender, what it is to be human?

That vast numbers of Nazi women were not held accountable for their complicity in the mass murders of the Holocaust due to their sex is a compelling argument for writing history to take into account the lens of gender.  

But what we can learn from Lower about the concept of “gender” or the supposed nature of women is less clear — only that notions about sex and gender are social and psychological constructs that are constantly being contradicted and overturned by the actual details of individual lives.

An aspect not dealt with in this book, but has been elsewhere, is the role at 'street-level' amongst the million of women who were not, seemingly, part of the 'Machine'. The 'Woman in the Street'.  Yes, like her Allied counterparts she worked in the factories (but a lot less than Allied womenfolk, as German ladies had slaves to 'help out' with the hard 'work' chores).

Mostly the Hausfrau was just that. She was at home.

And she was keeping a close eye on the street, especially the homes of Jews whom she could - and did regularly - denounce to the SS. Barely five minutes after the midnight knock on the door and the forced taking of people, the local hausfrau was in there taking the furniture and valuables.

Not part of the Machine, perhaps, but oily rags, polishing it and profiting from it.

Raised on the Nazi ideal of female wholesomeness, where the rosy glow of a woman’s cheeks was to come not from makeup but from robust activity, and where her worth increased with every child she bore, women nonetheless became killers once they landed on the eastern front. And this documented violence, challenging as it may be to 21st century gender expectations, if widely known at the time would have threatened Nazi gender ideology, exposing the falseness of Hitler’s Aryan mythology and humiliating the women of the Reich.

It is just as today.

Remember,  the American 'Democrats' are Socialists.
Nazi means the National SOCIALIST Workers Party of Germany.
Change of name: getting around to the same anti-humanity.

Try to raise the subject of Abortion, which in the West since the mid'70's has killed upward of 75 million babies, and the femi-nazis and a host of fellow-travelling female ( and some male) 'beneficiaries' will howl you down, calumnize you and pass laws to prevent you even praying silently in the street.

And baby do you need those prayers and that love because millions wanted you dead.

But isn’t this whiff of women’s presumed moral purity still in the air today?

So often women are held, in comparison with men, as the kinder sex, more peace-loving and relational, more committed to the protection of life.  

Yet the evil of the Holocaust was clearly an equal-opportunity affair, entered into by women who birthed children and loved their husbands as well as by the men who loved them in return.
 
“Mass murder transforms the people who witness it,” Lower writes, attributing the unimaginable cruelty of women such as Johanna Altvater and Erna Petri to repeated exposures to routine violence that stripped away their moral grounding.  

To understand this doesn’t mean that we consider these “Furies” any less accountable for the horrors they perpetrated.  

It means instead that when we hold the weight of their transgressions in front of us, we don’t shy away from pondering the possibility of our own capacity for evil in similar circumstances.
 
Today, when (anti-Male)* and other forms of hate speech fuel online media daily, when the scapegoating of (masculine)* groups is a tried and true political tactic, might we look at these women and pause for a moment to see at least a little bit of ourselves?  

Putting aside the reflexive tendency to view evil in black and white terms, might we benefit by remembering that one aspect of our common humanity is... 

a vulnerability to moral corruption?

If the legacy of the Holocaust and the work of scholars like Lower teach us anything, it’s the need for ordinary people — women as well as men— to continually monitor our moral decency.  

And if and when we see ourselves slipping into callousness, to do the hard but heroic work of quickening compassion and enlarging our hearts. 

Yes, hard as it is to look ourselves in the face, even harder is it to look into our hearts, minds and Souls.

Drink deep of Grace. Seek forgiveness. Seek a Better Path.


* My substitutions. See original, via the link.



Pax Dei Vobiscum.

 

Governing Golgafrincham: the Slow Death of Great Britain.

Most of the customers in the Tavern are Anglophiles of one sort or another; one degree or another. The effects of the English are probably greater in world history than any other nation or people, although not all effects were good and useful.

Much was of course and mostly from the 'heyday'.

Your host, me, is an Englishman by birth and inclination although I do presently permit a claim by Australia. I am nonetheless, first and foremost a man, a child of God and a knackered old Knight, King and Keeper of the Grail and Taverner. I am pleased with my fortune of having been born English, but even I recognise that all is not well, and the 'Old Dart' is as knackered as I am.

Not a Happy Chappie.

It is not as though the English sprang from the soil ready perfected like me. We evolved as a 'people' from the repeated invasion and butchery of and by many other sorts, mostly jealous of the 'Green and Pleasant Land' our ancestors occupied. So we are in fact a mongrel people with so many blood-types coursing through our veins that many people throughout the world and time could claim to be English too.

But even with infusions of fresh blood a body gets old and dies.

The United Kingdom is dying, I am sad to say.

And we had Stefan Molyneux  in today to spell it out for us.

Stefan is an Anglo, being Canadian. Canada is one of the offspring of England and I suspect he has more than a touch of one or two of our past invaders about him.

He has that presence of mind and integrity that gathers the facts and presents them, unvarnished, un-truncated so that we can make our own minds up.

He paints a picture of Golgafrincham as it would have been had it not built the 'B' Ark and all the useless buggers had stayed.

A bit of history:

 Golgafrincham , as described in the Hitch-Hikers guide to the Galaxy,  is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a "mutant star goat").

Modern Britain, like most Anglo countries has the Greenies and Global Warming as their destructive threat, although Greenpeace has yet to announce their Ark plans. Gaia is not the peaceful, fertile Goddess but a rather threatening Feminist beastie.

The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone".

The Captain of B-Ark.
Barking Mad.

It is not so much insurance salesmen and telephone sanitisers in Great Britain today, but a vast army of almost dead people in Government non-jobs. And in Government.


We, the People, threw off Kings and Warlords long ago. We virtually created democracy (despite the early prototype in ancient Greece). 

We devised, demanded, fought for and won FREEDOM.

We replaced the Kings with 'Commoners'.  These greedy, stupid, lazy, liars from our own 'lower orders' now Rule. The Telephone Sanitisers have their own Minister of the Crown. The Government have the TV producers in their pockets in the BBC.

 
The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on a suitably remote planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchian rejects gradually mingled with and usurped the native cavemen, becoming the ancestors of humanity and thereby altering and distorting the course of the great experiment to find the question for the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Or so Ford Prefect presumed. A lot of them didn't make it through the winter three years prior to Arthur Dent's reunion with Ford Prefect, and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set out on a raft. History says they must have survived.

But we have now embraced the ideal of  

FREE STUFF,  

rather than Freedom. 

 

 

And it ain't free, of course.

We hear a great deal about America's doleful economy and political  bastardry, but the noise from there tends to drown out news and information about the smaller economy and politics of what used to be Great Britain. Not that many folk take the time to listen. It takes effort to gather the pieces and paint a picture.

So Stefan does the job for us.

My advice is to sit back and educate yourselves. Have a drink or three. Free.

On the House.

The Fall of the United Kingdom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ibcORs4I4



Look. Life will go on.

History is a 'long game'. Nations rise and fall. We see it in our history books.

But right now we are living through one of the greatest falls of all time.

Do not let it go un-noticed.

Bye the way, if you think that there is an obvious culprit in all of that mess and in need of  some 'correction', remember that today is November the 5th.

Guy Fawkes Day.

 

Pax Dei.

Smarter Every Day

We get really nice people dropping into the Tavern. There are many really nice people in the world but our media tends to focus on crass and awful ones.

This one is a man I admire.

He is a very smart man who never comes across that way. Not deliberately. And he is making it his life's work to help many other people get.....

 Smarter Every Day.

He is a gifted teacher; a great dad, a loving husband; an explorer of beauty and intellectual understanding of the world we live in.

Yes, I know, there are others like him.

So tell me about them.

Meanwhile, here is Destin.

Destin has a huge suite of videos for you. I thoroughly recommend his work.

http://www.youtube.com/user/destinws2

It is just a guess, but I think he is pleasing to God.

Pax Dei.

Can Cats bring Wisdom?

It has been a tad quiet here the past few days, perhaps due to ghosties and wierdies roaming either side of Halloween. But down in Anna's pub, not far from the Tavern, in the more densely populated part of the village the Old Monk, Gildas has been telling tales.

How does one join the dots between stray cats, beautiful girls, a train, a propensity to kill, and wisdom?

I am taken by fine tales told by masters of the word and Gildas has excelled himself.

This chap has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So I am advising all to drop by the Raccoon Arms on the way home and see what he has to say. This may not be wise, I know, as Anna serves a good pint too, but as Gildas says....

but the Good Lord didn’t put me here to be all wise, he put me here to do my best, and that is what I am doing.

You can read a superb account of almost nothing at all but of such great humanity at... 

http://www.annaraccoon.com/monks-ramblings/overlords/

Meanwhile here are some snippets overheard. 

He was entirely traumatized by something, and whether he had ever had a home at all or whether he had lost his home and been forced to live wild was a matter of conjecture and I suppose I will never know the answer.

 

Not Gildas' cat. This is a model. She is under 18.

 I noticed a rather pretty girl pass my seat doubtless heading for the buffet bar. Let me just say that at this point I realised that going to the buffet seemed a good idea and I decided that I'd go too. Just a coincidence, mind. So, entirely by chance, I soon found myself behind this young lady of medium height in the queue at the buffet bar.

 

This is a different buffet car. On a train from Van in Turkey.
I may tell you a story about that one day, but not now.

 And thereupon I found myself a tad hoist by my own purely humanitarian petard, because she turned to look up at me (I being quite tall, and she of medium height) and shot me in the head.....

And this ain't Gildas, either.

 

OK, no, not really, I just said that for dramatic effect. But what happened had much the same effect as I found myself looking into the cool, slightly amused and very mischievous gaze of the most beautiful ocean blue eyes I have ever encountered. She wasn’t a “rather pretty girl”; she was a truly beautiful young woman. If you would like a comparison, I can only say: think Vivien Leigh, and you get the general idea. And, it transpired, her name was Lucy.

 

If anyone knows who this is, please send her to the Tavern.

It was very young cat, still a kitten really, and my immediate impression was that it was too young to be out at night. It was also obviously a “she”. She was obviously incredibly loving and trusting as she generally pestered me and I picked her up at once. She was tiny, jet black and very, very beautiful. She immediately purred and seemed quite content to be in my arms. I was instantly smitten. I knew straight away that I would have a role in looking after her, and that I would call her Lucy.

 

All together now.... Aaaahhh.

She is highly playful, and a killer. What she does to the feathers on the end of the bendy stick thing is quite terrifying,...

 Go and read, be entranced. Leave a comment. Then come back and tell me what you said.

It is Sunday and I have a Grail Crypt to mop and Mass to attend.

Pax Dei Vobiscum, and y'all be right back, y'hear.