Can you imagine the reporting that could have been made on Genghis Khan? Or the empire building wars of France, Spain, Islam and England? Could we not have been horrified by deliberate acts of violence and murder, the drug wars, the butchery and all for what? money and land. The journalists would have had a…
Month: June 2024
The Fact of the Matter
there has to be some agreement on what meets the requirements to be a fact. A lie, for example, is a ‘thing’, it exists as a lie but we cannot accept it as fact because it is not t be believed. But not all facts are verifiable by every human being. Sometimes we have to…
Permanent Crisis
There is a delightful programmer on Radio 4 where they take an issue of today and set it side-by-side with a similar issue from centuries ago. It is entitled The Long View but what it shows is that while society morphs from one generation to another the problems faced by the human population rarely change….
Broken
The general public as evinced by the news reports here in the UK are of a mind that the country is broken. I heard one man say even in Thatcher’s day when the country was riven with discontent the fabric of society itself was not as broken. Another said we are treating pensioners very badly…
London
always noisy, always dirty and now boiling hot. i was watering the children’s garden at the church and not minding getting the water over me. The drive up was six hours after taking away a stop for lunch. It used to be 4 and a half hours but we hit the rush hour up to…
When there is conflict
the world itself becomes very interesting. It is not that it falls into war, but it is how the different groups fall and the hidden thinking comes to the fore from surprising places. How university professors support Hamas, dedicated to murder, How angry Israelis tie a wounded man to the front of a jeep. How …
Why Do They Run?
After correcting anti-Israeli posters on facebook and linkedIn on many occasions and they actually getting angry (Netanyahu is a liar, Israel is evil) their posts stopped coming. I thought it was because they didn’t enjoy being contradicted with fascist but actually they just dropped me as someone who could see their posts. So why did…
In the Till
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s day the Conservative Party was busy privatising companies owned by the nation and limiting the numbers of shares available to any single applicant in order to expand share ownership. I recall at least two members of Parliament trying to make multiple applications illegally. It is fair to say many people would…
Noam Chomsky
According to his wikipedia page he suffered a stroke last year and is convalescing in Brazil with his wife. At 95 it is obvious he will die at some stage soon but the stroke has left him unable to communicate or take any part in his usual reasonable caustic but always incisive commentary on world…
Derived Opinion
If you don’t know something is going on, you can hardly have an opinion about it. Or you may have an general opinion but you can’t have any in-depth knowledge of the facts. So who decides what we get to know? If the individual isn’t taught to use libraries and differentiate facts and fictions in…