I was delighted tom spent an evening with a friend I have not seen in forty years. We were at school together. I was interested in our conversation about religion in which he said he had never thought there was a difference between the stories religions tell and Robin Hood. It was all about good…
U-Boats
I never wondered before because sometimes I have watched documentaries on the Second World War and just gone with whatever the commentator is saying, but on D Day and days after no U-Boats attacked the huge fleet. Commodore Johnnie Walker is a folk hero in Liverpool. He had been interested in submarines since World War…
Past War
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…
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…