I don’t usually feel sorrow for religious leaders who mean one thing and say another because they are old or because religious people generally have a different way of thinking. The Pope is right to ask for warring parties to seek peace but his way of saying it was not helpful. You would never mention…
Category: Quotidial
A Little Harsh
We have something called Council Tax which is a local tax to pay for the police etc at a local level. Non-Payment brings with it a court order and a payment schedule. The tax is linked to the market value of the house. In the USA property taxes are the equivalent but I have just…
What To Do with the 30%
After Brexit and Trump last time round my friend told me he thought there were about 30% of people in the UK and US that were, to put it mildly, susceptible to these nationalistic, tub-thumping men on the make. Well, ok he called them ‘;thick’ but what they actually are is hurt and / or…
A Lost Day
It is actually dry here so I did manage to do a lot of tidying up in the garden. The day was mostly people going over the ridiculous budget we have just been given which sounded more like a tour guide of the UK with a million given here, a million given there. It was…
Letting the World go By
How much time do we take running the world and forget how it runs us. The spring is round the corner but how many of us would take delight in seeing the flowers growing in the fields, hear the birds getting busy having babies, see foxes playing as cubs and have no desire to disturb…
How Do We Remember?
This is a question that is the corollary of ‘what do we choose to remember’. As nations we decided this long ago with the way in which we teach history to children; the overriding aim of which is the past was nationalistic and today seeks to arouse deep patriotism as a default position. How we…
The New Grammar
The page was down yesterday. I had uploaded a new plug in to try out a tag cloud and it interfered with the wordpress architecture. Once before when this happened it was the php version that needed upgrading but this time ftp didn’t show the files and I had to go to php-admin to search…
Sino-American Relations
So a Republican thinks the odds of warring with China are ‘very high’. Michael McCaul of Texas argues that the US will protect Taiwan and China will invade it. Taiwan was fought over by the Europeans, invaded and traded with by China (after a lot of the populations had died of diseases) and annexed in…
Resignation
Our government here in the UK – with an unelected Prime Minister and a self-destructive crookedness that only comes with regimes not governments, started today with tax avoidance and a dismissal. But that is not why I am resigned. Political theory weighs heavily upon experience and past practice and with Russia losing the first round…
Playing Games With Nature
Countries don’t care. Leaders just wish to keep their populations happy with their leadership. Even here in theory a Prim Minister could in theory stay in power for life if the people voted for then every election. In the US at least there are limits. Now we see how these leaders strip the plant in…