Communities Are In Deep Peril

David Cameron’s new emphasis on the importance of Christian faith in his life sits uneasily with his government’s championing of the rich and powerful.
We direct the Tory Prime Minister to the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24 : “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
( Daily Mirror, 11.04.2014 )

Attempting To Buy Votes.
George Osborne suddenly posing as Father Christmas after years of playing Scrooge is a Con act that will only be swallowed by the criminally gullible.
The austerity Chancellor’s new spin is a sure sign the general election is approaching.
The Conservatives are in trouble so they’re reverting to the old trick of attempting to buy votes.
( Daily Mirror, 18.03.2014 )

Almost 1.75million of Britain’s poorest families have been made poorer by a ‘perfect storm’ of Coalition benefit cuts, an Oxfam report reveals.
The charity said the Government’s welfare cap and bedroom tax were to blame for much of the misery.
The worst-hit 200,000 families are losing out by £864 per year.
( Tom McTague, 22.04.2014 )

Where Has Our Money Gone ?
In the past six years, water companies have made £11billion in profits from our bills – surely enough to have stopped its customers from having raw sewage flooding into their homes every time there is a heavy downpour.
So where has our money gone?
In the same six-year period, water firms – many owned by overseas and private equity groups – have handed £9billion to shareholders.
According to the Consumer Council for Water, complaints from homeowners about sewer flooding are up by 50% compared with last year, and it is the water companies who are responsible.
( Antony Barnett, 02.02.2014 )

How a government treats the vulnerable is a guide to its decency.
This lot are indecent.
( Daily Mirror, 11.04.2014 )

The Religious Posturing Of Tory Politicians.
Christianity is embedded in our culture, and christian values of decency, looking after others and non-violence, are the rule rather than the exception.
We may no longer be taught the Ten Commandments, as I was at All Saints’ Primary, but most of us still do unto others as we would wish to be done unto ourselves.
You don’t have to go to church to behave properly.
What sticks in my craw is the religious posturing of Tory politicians who preach one thing and practise another.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Dave.
( Paul Routledge, 25.04.2014 )

What you believe is not the problem.
What you think I should believe is the problem.

Neanderthals Were People, Like Us.
The long-held view that Neanderthals were inferior to Homo sapiens is changing as, one by one, capabilities thought unique to us have been linked to them.
Recent discoveries indicate that Neanderthals built shelters and hearths, controlled fire, wore clothes, cooked food, made tools, and created glue to attach spear points to their shafts.
There is also evidence that they cared for sick individuals, wore symbolic ornaments, and buried their dead.
According to Erik Trinkaus, professor of physical anthropology at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, “Neanderthals were people, and they probably had the same range of mental abilities we do”.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
( Aldous Huxley )

Hell Is The Place For Us.
Before you belittle someone for not being white or speaking English, just remember who the real Americans are and what they look like, the indigenous Native Indians.
When you people came to our land, you brought bibles, guns and disease.
You killed us with your guns and disease.
You stole our land.
You raped our women and children, fed our babies to your dogs, and cut off our hands and feet if we disobeyed you.
You called us godless savages when it was you who were the godless savages.
If there is a heaven filled with people like you, then hell is the place for us.

Why do so many nations hate America?
All they want to do is invade your country, drop bombs on, and fire missiles at your towns and cities, steal your resources, install puppet dictators, and if you attempt to resist or defend yourself, they will call you terrorists.

The spirit in the good soul will always overcome the demon in the evil soul.
( Rose Winfold )

Blair’s Crusade Against Islam.
Blair wants us to intervene against Syrian despot Bashar al Assad in support of the opposition.
Which is a rag-bag collection containing Islamist fundamentalists, of which al Qaeda are only one group.
He offers unswerving support to the Egyptian junta which overthrew a democratically elected government, and which voilently suppresses their own people and jails foreign journalists.
He wants us to overlook China and Russia’s appalling human rights abuses, so long as they’ll join his modern-day crusade against Islam.
But then when the two countries he permanently sucks up to in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia and Israel, maybe human rights issues don’t matter that much to him.
He warns of the rise of Muslim extremism, neatly forgetting that because of his unswerving support for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, he was deputy chief recruitment officer for its cause.
It’s Blair’s lack of self-awareness or regret over Iraq that is most chilling.
A report from the Royal United Services Institute concluded that Britain’s role in Iraq seriously radicalised young British Muslims and helped promote global terrorism.
It also claimed that the financial cost to Britain of the two unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when long-term veteran care is factored in, will rise above £60billion.
How many lives could the NHS have saved with that?
Yet Blair believes our skint country needs to re-start the war machine to waste more lives and more billions.
( Brian Reade, 26.04.2014 )

Chums who are teachers or have children see Gove as the Devil incarnate.
He’s like the boy at school upon whom you take pity because he is bullied, only to discover he was a git all along.
( Jim Burke, Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer )

Jesus Held Me The Night My Parents Died.
There was an atheist couple who had a child.
The couple never told their daughter anything about religion or God.
One night when the little girl was 5-years-old, the parents fought with each other and her dad shot her mum, right in front of the child.
Then, her dad shot himself.
The little girl watched it all.
She then was sent to a foster home.
The foster mother was a Christian and took the child to church.
On the first day of Sunday school, the foster mother told the teacher that the girl had never heard of Jesus, and to have patience with her.
The teacher held up a picture of Jesus and said, “Does anyone know who this is?”
The little girl said, “I do, that’s the man who was holding me the night my parents died”.

Seen in Sainsbury’s, a small yellow notice warning that ‘for the safety and security of our colleagues and customers, audio may be monitored and recorded’.
We knew they were watching.
Now they’re listening too.
Who would have thought that Big Brother would come into being among the yogurt and the biscuits?
( Peter Hitchens, 08.12.2013 )

No Muslim Woman Should Be Forced To Wear A Veil.
Why does no one challenge the existence of the so-called ‘Islamic Parliaments’, with their retrogressive laws, that exist in cities such as Bradford and Leicester?
In these cities, teams of vigilantes terrorise Pakistani communities.
They turn up unannounced to homes, insisting that Ramadan is respected and checking that everyone has come to prayers.
They force shops to close, they check that the community is fasting, that women wear the veil.
Let me be clear – No Muslim woman should be forced to wear a veil.
No woman wore it in the era of the Prophet.
These Muslims may see themselves as community champions, but they are fanatics who make life a misery for young people who want to integrate.
It is time for liberal Muslims to speak out.
The defenders of our precious multiculturalism must get real.
My message to those who promote these entrenched ghetto ideas is this:
Go home if you want to practice your form of Islam.
There is no place for it here.
( Nadira Naipaul, September 2012 )

What self-respecting male puts by £90 for a haircut?
The Prime Minister, apparently.
Last week came the news that David Cameron’s stylist, Lino Carbosiero, was awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours for ‘services to hairdressing’.
Services to the Treasury, more like.
( Viv Groskop, 12.01.2014 )

The Political Wing Of The Banking Hierarchy.
Never before has a Chancellor of the Exchequer appeared so reluctant to do the right thing.
George Osborne’s lack of enthusiasm for vetoing monster bonuses at the largely taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland shows he’s on the wrong side of the debate.
Only European Union rules and the prospect of a public backlash as the General Election looms closer forced him to do the decent thing and represent voters instead of his City friends.
But the Chancellor’s continued refusal to impose sanity on the Lloyd’s Group, where the state is still the biggest shareholder, tells us that he’s happy for bailed-out bankers to enrich themselves beyond the dreams of avarice.
Austerity for the many and obscene prosperity for a wealthy few is his code.
We aren’t all in this together and never were under a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that, particularly on the Tory side, is the political wing of the banking hierarchy.
( Daily Mirror, 26.04.2014 )

Now that we have reduced Syria to ruins and refugee camps through our noble benevolence, we want to do the same to Ukraine.
Western media and politicians, who do not even understand their own societies, repeatedly descend on foreign countries posing as liberators, encouraging and funding rebellions.
Too late, they find they have called up unstoppable, demonic violence, and lit fires they cannot put out.
( Peter Hitchens, 26.01.2014 )

Communities Are In Deep Peril.
Staff working for multinational companies, on the minimum wage, with minimum break times and minimum interest in what they do for a living, have no incentive to engage in basic human relations with their customers.
The heart of our communities is in deep peril.
Our basic, decent, everyday social interaction – the very foundation of modern civilisation – is in danger of extinction.
It’s all well and good to give lottery funding to sport and art and crumbling buildings of national importance, but I truly believe that independent markets, high streets and good independent local pubs should have long-lasting financial and moral support bestowed on them for the sake of the very fabric of our country.
( Chris Evans, October 2012 )

Where The police Never Go.
I am reluctant to name the communities in question but there are communities from other cultures who would prefer to police themselves.
There are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called.
They never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own.
They just have their own form of community justice.
It’s their belief (chief constables) that those communities are administering their own form of justice.
It’s not that the police are afraid to go into these areas or don’t want to go into those areas, but if the police don’t get calls for help then of course they won’t know what’s going on.
They don’t know what injustices are being perpetrated.
It’s almost a closed book because we can’t go there so don’t know.
It could be anything from low-level crime right up to murder.
Honour killings are the most extreme example.
That is murder.
There is no honour in it.
( Tom Winsor, Chief Inspector of Constabulary. Reported by Peter Hitchens, 26.01.2014 )

Osborne’s Budget Gave Youth Nothing.
I tried to imagine what any of the 912,000 unemployed 18-25s would make of a Chancellor spending an hour talking up the country’s future while mentioning the word “young” only three times, against “pension” 151 times.
What, I thought, would a young jobless person make of Osborne’s description of a Budget for the “makers, the doers and the savers” when they’re not using their hands to make anything, have nothing to do, and nothing to save.
The whole Westminster scene must have looked alien.
A mass of mainly middle-aged white men, that tatty old red box, the Mace, the yah-boo juvenile heckling, the feigned laughter, the public school accents of the main players.
At the 2010 General Election, the average age of the voter was 49.
Next year it will be closer to 51.
That’s why Osborne’s Budget gave youth nothing.
( Brian Reade, 22.03.2014 )