We Are Ruled By The Least Noble

Truly Terrifying.
I’ve been trying for almost three years to land an interview with Sarah Palin, one of the most polarising and divisive characters in American politics.
Today, she finally gave me her answer, by way of an extraordinary photo she posted on Facebook.
It depicted a smirking Ms Palin in hunting combat fatigues, astride a dead bloodied bear, and with an assault rifle across its torso.
‘Piers’, she’d scrawled in her own writing across the alarmingly horrific image, “Kind of busy right now.”
This woman was at one stage the running mate to a Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain.
If he’d beaten Barack Obama in 2009, Sarah Palin would have almost certainly been his Vice-President, and thus, as the macabre saying goes, a heartbeat away from the Presidency itself.
Just imagine that itchy finger on the nuclear trigger.
Truly terrifying.
( Piers Morgan, 25.10.2013 )

We Wouldn’t Be Human.
We all do things in our lives and we look back and think, ‘should have done this, could have done that’.
At the end of the day it’s part of your experience, part of what makes you as a person.
It’s the past.
I wouldn’t want to have missed out on the good parts, and there were good parts.
I don’t think anyone expects to go through life totally unscathed and making all the right decisions and being 100 per cent sunny every day.
If we didn’t feel stress, anxiety, regret, pain – we’d be monsters.
We wouldn’t be human.
( Jennifer Lopez )

We Lose The Skills To Recover.
Nobody is supposed to mention it, but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own industries and jobs from foreign competition.
Everyone’s supposed to be in favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the USA look after their own all the time.
But we won’t do it.
We abide by rules our rivals mock.
And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to recover.
( Peter Hitchens, 10.11.2013 )

The reason for all our problems, misery and suffering today?
We are ruled by the powerful, the rich, the greedy, and the selfish.
Not by the smartest or the kindest.
( R S Hutchison )

Police Deal Out Death.
When we had the gallows, our police were unarmed.
And if the state wanted to kill someone, it could only do so after a jury trial, an appeal and the chance of clemency.
This was called ‘obscene’ and ‘barbaric’.
Now we have a heavily-armed police force whose members deal out death as helicopters thunder overhead.
No trial, no jury, no judge, no appeal.
And those who said capital punishment was wicked refuse to see the connection.
( Peter Hitchens )

The Trick Is Being Able To Control Your Body Temperature.
Part extrovert, part wallflower.
I was a daredevil, always trying to ingratiate myself with my peers by doing risky things like jumping off walls.
I was naughty and I hope I still am.
Hopefully I’m more extrovert than introvert now.
I guess I prefer to be quite private.
It’s a myth that actors are exhibitionists.
It’s the research and working with other people that fascinates me.
When I came out of drama school I was in a shared house in Sydney.
I literally had to ration my money so that I could have a coffee in a cafe every alternate day.
I worked in an old folks’ home.
I’d go after school and heat up the food the cook had left and serve it, talk to the patients and then clear up and wash up afterwards.
I grew up listening to music and going to the theatre.
I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and I read a lot of detective novels.
But one of the performances that made me want to become an actress was seeing Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
That was quite extraordinary.
I never get embarrassed.
If I ever feel embarrassed, I’m able to completely hide it.
When I feel like I’m about to blush I can will it not to happen.
The trick is being able to control your body temperature.
It’s such a gift and might partly explain why I’ve got to where I am in life.
I’m beyond embarrassment.
Like any mum I fear some mysterious illness befalling my children.
Apart from that I’m not good with spiders.
People who say there’s nothing to fear from spiders have clearly never been to Australia.
( Cate Blanchett )

The Facts Speak For Themselves.
Britain banned most guns after Dunblane, has not had a school shooting since, and has just 35 gun murders a year.
America does nothing, endures endless school shootings, and has 11,000 gun murders a year.
The facts speak for themselves.
A 13-year-old boy stole his parents’ gun in Reno, Nevada yesterday, went to school, shot and killed a teacher and wounded two 12-year-old classmates.
And so it goes on.
( Piers Morgan, 22.10.2013 )

Many people will have to choose between keeping warm and eating and I don’t think that is acceptable.
( Former Prime Minister Sir John Major demands a windfall tax on energy firm profits after big price hikes )

London Is A Safe Refuge For The Rich.
London is no longer affordable for the merely rich.
There is a more seriously troubling side to the new wealth, too.
If privacy is part of London’s appeal, so too is the generous tax regime for ‘non-doms’ and the lack of scrutiny of how the fortunes have been obtained.
British hedge fund founder Bill Browder says, “A lot of the money sloshing around Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea and Knightsbridge is what I’d describe as blood money, flowing from horrific crimes.
Not every member of the Russian super-rich is guilty of criminal behaviour, but a large proportion is.”
London is a place where the rich can buy £50million houses with offshore companies to hide their cash, where they can avoid tax, escape from legal prosecution from their homeland, and – for the most part – avoid being kidnapped and murdered.
It is a safe refuge from extradition when charges of fraud and embezzlement are raised.
President Putin may be right to say that no one pays attention to Great Britain.
Certainly that is the view taken by the millionaires and billionaires flocking to this country.
They value the privacy we offer and – in a worrying number of cases – our readiness to turn a blind eye.
( Mark Hollingsworth, 08.09.2013 )

Politicians questioning the honesty and integrity of the police?
If you didn’t laugh you’d cry.
( Norman Woods )

The number of property millionaires in the UK has risen by almost 78,000 in a year.
A house price rich list has estimated that 323,684 UK homes are now worth over £1million. A rise of a third in a year.

Royal Mail Sold Off Cheap At The Expense Of The Taxpayer.
The two biggest private investors in Royal Mail have between them made more than £80million profit on the shares since the postal service was privatised.
Hedge fund TCI, which emerged last week as the largest single investor, has made a profit on paper of more than £57million according to calculations by The Mail on Sunday.
Meanwhile GIC, the Singapore government’s investment fund, is showing a profit of more than £24million on its stake in Royal Mail declared last week.
Between them the two funds now own almost ten per cent of the postal carrier.
The likely profits made by the two funds – the only private investors to declare their stakes so far – will fuel claims that Royal Mail was sold too cheaply and that the under-valuation has lined the pockets of big City investors at the expense of the taxpayer.
( Simon Watkins, 27.10.2013 )

Technology has taken over our lives and I want it to stop.
If you see me on the train I’ll be the one looking dreamily out of the window rather than plugged into an iPod.
I see couples on the train now and they spend the entire journey listening to their separate devices.
Not a word is exchanged between them.
( Emilia Fox )

A Huge Change In The Lives Of British People.
Those of us who warned for years about mass immigration can only grieve now that the things we predicted are coming true.
It is starting – where else? – in the primary schools, where people are simply having to accept that many, especially in less well-off areas, will be too full from now on.
Next it will be housing, which is why Government Ministers are screeching curses at those who are trying to stop them concreting over the countryside and turning spacious suburbs into crowded urban quarters.
I can’t see why those who have saved all their lives to live in pleasant places should be forced to lose their peace and space, because cynical politicians left the nation’s door open for ten years and now can’t close it.
Then it will be the NHS, if it isn’t already, with GPs and casualty departments overwhelmed by numbers, and, of course, the roads and public transport.
This is a huge change in the lives of British people, unasked for, undeclared, undiscussed.
It is only just beginning.
( Peter Hitchens, 08.09.2013 )

The United States does not simply interfere, but is an active participant in the internal political life of Central European countries.
( Viktor Orban, Hungarian Prime Minister )

Some welfare reforms, especially in the field of housing benefit, seem almost designed to destabilise people’s relationships with their local communities.
Where the poor and vulnerable carry a disproportionate share of the burden created by the financial crisis, something is wrong.
( Church of England report, July, 2013 )

I Hated Being Skinny And Funny Looking.
I was the first working-class model. Before me, it was only middle and upper-class families that could afford to send their daughters to modelling school.
My life was turned upside down at the age of 16.
The journalist Deirdre McSharry called me the “Face of 1966” in the Daily Express on 27 February and that was the day my life changed for ever.
I didn’t understand the fuss over me.
I was being whisked around the world, put in beautiful clothes, told I was gorgeous and earning lots of money.
I just remember thinking, “God, they’re all mad !”
I hated being skinny and funny looking and desperately wanted a bosom.
Everyone calls me Twiggy.
One of my early boyfriend’s brothers nicknamed me Twiggy because of my skinny legs and it stuck.
It’s only my sisters who call me Lesley.
( Twiggy )

We Don’t Feel Secure In Our Own Home.
I don’t know why disabled people are being made scapegoats.
I voted Conservative in the last election.
I trusted them.
Now, I think, what have I done?
Why does the Government think we are the answer to the country’s money problems?
We don’t even feel secure in our own home.
( Lindsey Heard has a disabled daughter and is being made to pay an extra £80 a month ‘Bedroom Tax’ for a 57 sq.ft. box room )

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.
( Voltaire )

We are led by the least among us.
The least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.
( Terence McKenna )

The Conservative Party is an eternally irritating force for wrong that appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men, faded entertainers and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with some essential part of their soul missing.
( Charlie Brooker )

Great Britain – Love It Or Leave It, Please.
My own life tells me that this is the most tolerant country on the planet.
I grew up in a white working class community in what was very much an overwhelmingly homogenous Britain.
But now I live in a country where the fastest growing ethnic community is mixed race – and my beautiful 10-year-old daughter is one of them.
For more than 20 years I have been married to someone who was born on the other side of the planet.
Two languages are spoken in my home.
I was born into one kind of Britain and now I live in another kind of Britain. And it works.
This is a healthy, happy, tolerant land.
But there is no reason why we should learn to tolerate the intolerable.
And if our country is going to have a future, then we have to share some basic human values.
Personally, I don’t care what cricket team you support and I don’t care where you were born and I don’t care what God you worship.
But if we are to live together, and if our children and our grandchildren are to share a future, then we need to share some basic humanity, some common decency and some sense of what is good and evil.
There are too many ghettos in this country.
There are too many people who live here but who feel nothing for our country – or even loathing and contempt.
I think of the decent Muslim families I have known.
I think of the little Muslim girls who played with my daughter.
And I think of them today because I know that there will be more racism in the hearts of my countrymen.
Hatred breeds nothing but hatred.
Oh, we really need to start believing in the same things!
But it is hard when there are millions of people who do not share the ordinary citizen’s views on women, politics, gays and the armed forces.
How do we live together without killing each other?
We need to believe in the same core of goodness.
No matter what our political beliefs or where we worship, we need to love this country.
There is truly no other way for us to live in peace.
I am proud that the people of my country have never crawled in the face of cowardly murder.
They never will. Great Britain – love it or leave it, please.
( Tony Parsons, 25.05.2013 )