Stranded MEPs.

I see that 6 MEPs are stranded in Greenland due to an airline strike.

Best place for 'em!

Beware, beware, beware.

The ex-Hereford goalkeeper David Icke is dangerous - unfortunately, he has a widespread readership of the huge amounts of utter trash he peddles and acolytes who hang onto his every word in meetings which can last for hours on end and uses emotionalism to win over the gullible to whom he preaches.True cult values.
This man who described himself at one time as the '"Son of the Godhead" has even subverted the faith of the born again.
Ironically, the research he has done for some of his books has been to a very high standard when exposing some of the conspiracies in the world today from secret societies to the Bilderberg Group.
Sadly, this then leads onto wild accusations of members of the Royal Family actually being part alien; shape-shifting reptiles to be more precise. His crazy theories - easily accessed online - are put forward as if they carry the same weight as his proper research.
If there are global conspiracies - and I for one certainly do not dismiss them - the work of this man who 'investigates' them is at least as dangerous as the real thing.
Furthermore, anybody who diverts us from The Lord Jesus Christ is evil - however outwardly agreeable he may appear.

Joe Arpaio.

It is long overdue for this Blog to feature Arizona's one man blitz against crime, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who also supervises the prison service. He polices the 6th largest county in the USA.

Let us hear in his own words the philosophy - which is not mere words - which he has truly implemented:

"My enforcement and jail program philosophies are all geared to be tough on crime and those who commit crime. Overall, it is my belief that a person who commits a crime should be held accountable and face the consequences of their actions. In direct terms, they should receive just punishment for their lack of responsibility and discipline. Specifically in the county jail system which I manage, it is my belief that inmates should never live better behind bars than the outside in free society. Therefore I maintain an austere system with no frills and have implemented programs to curtail recidivism."

This ' austerity' includes chain gangs to work on public projects - no sexism, they are for women too - pink pyjamas for felons to wear during the day, tents instead of cells in searing heat, 40 cents spent per meal.

The one point is that nobody has to go there. Every prisoner has volunteered by their actions and offending.

This is retributive punishment. It vindicates, protects and deters. The good Sheriff also runs a number of rehabilitation programmes from literacy to parenting, to help prepare prisoners for the outside world.

Can't you just hear our so-called do-gooders? - "Barbaric! Undignified. Humiliating." - Well. It works for me!

It also works for the local voters. Joe has an approval rating which never falls below 75% and often hits 85%.

Crime? - Nowhere near as popular as it used to be!

Inexplicable! It must be a blip or a coincidence.

Flight.

Okay. So all facets of creation evolved gradually over aeons of time.
An oldie but a goodie. How did flight evolve gradually, then?
"I think I'll jump off this cliff and see if I can evolve some flight in the millions of years to pass before I hit the bottom." - Hmm. Perhaps not. "Perhaps I should plan to evolve gradually over a few million years - being able to fly in the future could be quite useful."
I have spent many a happy hour reading the rantings of unifomitarian geologists trying desperately and unsuccessfully to worm their way out of this one. Some of the madcap ideas presented are so absurd as to make you question the very sanity of many scientists.
[Besides lemmings have already tried it and haven't yet managed it!] All of this before we consider the unbelievable complexity in the design of a feather.
Just one total flaw in the evolutionary hypothesis. The argument is now whether similar flaws number thousands or mere hundreds.
The FACT of evolution. Laugh time!

Why crime?

Crime is now the largest concern of the electorate according to a recent survey.
Let us consider why crime today is so prevalent in our tortured society - always remembering that the familiar leftwing excuse of 'poverty' simply holds little water as today we only have relative poverty and must be compared to the 30s.
1] Sentencing levels have plummeted since 1950.
2] There is a PC belief that "inside every offender is an honest citizen struggling to get out" which is manifestly untrue in the majority of cases. I know. I have sat on the Bench!
3] Communities have become fragmented - one consequence of which being that no longer can a yob expect to have bad behaviour immediately reported to parents who have a local reputation to maintain.
4] Family breakdown - and in particular the rise of the single parent family.
5] Discipline within the home is wretched. Children are allowed to push back boundaries, challenge parents, be bribed to behave. Many are given no responsibilities in the home.
6] Moral teaching; righteousness is largely absent.
7] The concept of 'shame' has been calculatedly removed by the do-gooders and politically correct lobby.
8] Discipline has declined in schools. Pupils are now being taught by teachers who themselves have only a limited understanding of discipline from their own upbringing - an extremely worrying point.
9] Courts refuse or are unable to pass realistic sentences on adults and youths in particular.
10] There is no element of fear for offenders.
11] Local neighbourhoods do not unite and demand action.
12] The Police appear to have given up - their bosses happier to see them form-filling and training in 'diversity issues' rather than catching and preventing crime.
13] There is a profoundly dishonest pretence that 'community punishments work.
14] Drug use is not controlled and alcohol treated as a joke.
15] Believe me when I say that prisons are too 'user friendly' - I have visited three.
16] People are not required to take responsibility for their actions.
17] Children have instant access to pornography, extremely violent films and games thus desensitising them.
18] Childhood ends too early and has been replaced with an ersatz sophistication.
19] The left simply do not believe that most crime stems from greed, selfishness and often, downright wickedness.
20] Why do people offend? - Because we permit them to.
21] There is no effective Christian teaching in our nation.
22] The God-fearing element in our society is absent.
23] The left see Man as the author of his own salvation.
24] In a Godless, mechanistic, dog-eat-dog, evolutionary universe - why behave?
25] Crime pays.

*We have a broken society. Can you be surprised when we have got so much wrong - with almost all of these problems originating from the left of centre and never repaired by the right of centre?

**We have now reached a stage when only the severest of punishments can be the quick fix. The other areas, in many cases are beyond rescue.

Rosette

Rosette is Ugandan and attends a Church in Sheffield. She is to be deported back to Uganda shortly, where as a Christian, she is likely to face persecution.
Her violent, unstable husband whom she had left behind has joined a terrorist group and may well kill her for having left him. She is locked up at Yarls Wood in Bedfordshire.
Her child was born in Britain. She has been here six years where she has proved a fine Church member; a worker for hospice charities; a willing student and a worthy citizen.
She made a proper and legitimate claim for asylum - unlike many.
According to Mr Blunkett the former Home Secretary, 90% of asylum seekers are bogus - in the light of that, what a great system our government has got: "Let's target the 10%!"
We may also ask why our government has failed to include Uganda on the list of countries proscribed from receiving deportees.
Perhaps she should have been: Muslim, terrorist, lesbian, criminal, anti-social, feckless, idle or a murderer of headmasters - then she would surely have qualified to stay!
I know of two Zimbabweans in the locality who may also be deported to where their lives will be immediately under threat.
Can this administration get anything right?

UPDATE: Some progress. 6/9/07 - Rosette granted bail by a judge and is back in Sheffield. The saga continues.

Pity our soldiers.

One of the problems with leftwing governments is that they utterly scorn the military in all its forms.
They always forget that the prime duty of government is the protection of the nation's borders and ensuring the safety of its citizenry.
It is difficult to see how Labour has achieved these musts when you take into account: its sellout to the EU; immigration which has spiralled totally out of control; criminals in control of our streets and the running down of our armed forces to levels so low that the thought of being able to protect places such as the Falklands must be seen as a distant pipedream.
Against this backcloth Labour is engaged in two major conflicts where our troops are being butchered to no purpose whatsoever - if reports of low morale, inferior equipment and PC attitudes from on high are to be believed, they have probably ruined the best army in the world. [I do not deny that the Tories must take a certain proportion of the blame for carrying on the process from the previous Labour government.]
If all this were not sufficient, there are no dedicated military hospitals left! Troops are being dumped into ordinary, non-specialist wards - sometimes alongside virulent leftwingers who abuse them when they have been wounded.
Soldiers are getting close to the point of revolt. Can they be blamed? Not since pre-Wellington days have British troops been held in such contempt.
As a Christian, I am told I must not hate. Okay - on an individual level I do a fairly good job but on the political level, I hate/ abhor/ utterly despise leftwing politics!

[The hypocritical way they have dealt with the mighty Gurkhas would have been classed as racism of the worst kind with any other government in power.]

LINK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=477929&in_page_id=1770

The Persecuted Church.

30 years ago, intellectuals, politicians, the media and those today we call politically correct, would attack the worst excesses of the Roman Catholic Church and possibly the extremes of the American Holy Rollers.
Today, people like Chris Hitchens and Dawkins - of whom there are considerable numbers with a media voice - attack Christianity from all angles.

Lefties screech 'islamophobia' and will not allow the tiniest of criticisms against that belief system without cries of 'racism' echoing from the highest rooftops yet contentedly stand by with a smug, self-satisfied smile whenever the Church is attacked in the vilest of ways.
It is only a matter of time before Dawkins gets his way and teaching your children about The Lord Jesus will be classed as abuse.
This is NOT exaggeration. The speed of the deterioration in society is rapid and I fear for the next decade as double standards increase.

The apathy of the Church and failure to recognise the 'signs of the times' is tragic.

Photo: Chris Hitchens.

T rex proteins.

If T Rex died out countless millions of years ago and you find fibrous tissue, blood vessels and proteins in a dated 68 million years old specimen [Science 13 April 2007] you have done rather well.
As such biological material is 'scientifically accepted ' as unable to survive more than a 100,000 years - questions must be asked.
They have been asked and answers are eagerly awaited. The trouble is that the obvious question is being ignored totally. You know the one. "Doesn't this rather prove that T Rex was around rather more recently than uniformitarian evolutionists claim?
No. That is the question which may not be asked as it challenges the accepted thinking!
And they tell us that scientists always use scientific method!
"Finding original organic material in a fossil of this age is a genuine suprise." - Oh!

LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6548719.stm

Nigerian Persecution.

For the second time in 18 months, Bishop Kwashi and his family in Plateau State have been violently attacked by an armed gang in their own home.The targeted persecution of Christians in Nigeria is common and believed to be on the increase.The Anglican Bishop of Jos was told that he was going to be killed in front of his family. It appears that prayer worked. He lived to tell the tale.

Tolerance.

"By this love you have for one another shall all men know you are my disciples."


"Love your neighbour as yourself."




The Scriptures certainly indicate the kind of attitudes Christianity should have towards people - including those different from ourselves.


So, at first sight, tolerance is a major Christian virtue.


The problem is that tolerance is not a virtue in itself but rather a double-edged sword. We are not expected to tolerate that which is intolerable.


'Tolerance as an all-embracing virtue' is an invention of the liberal left; a corruption of Christianity.


Are we to tolerate forced marriages or female circumcision? Should we tolerate the subjugation of women beacause it forms the part of another culture? The examples are endless.


The liberal left, in order to 'fight discrimination' ,has become incapable of being discriminating.


These are the same people who accuse Christians of being 'judgemental' if they stand up for Scriptural truths. Not a particularly clever means of attack, it is one which has enjoyed disproportionate amounts of success, largely because of that fifth column in Christianity called the liberal church.

Why are prisons overflowing?

I have addressed the issue previously of why we have more criminals in our jails than in most other European countries.
A different way of looking at this issue was pointed out in a recent, knowledgeable letter to the media.
Apparently, we jail fewer offenders per 1,000 serious crimes than virtually any other country - certainly in Europe.
Ergo, our jails contain more prisoners because we have considerably more crime. Remember to combine this to the more generalised effects of liberal sentencing policies which actually increase prison numbers.

More than one in eight in our prisons is a foreign national. Deportation would seem to be a means of remedying recidivism rates amongst these groups.

[If I can track down the statistics, I shall add them to this posting.]

***UPDATE: I now have the figures for Spain. We jail 12 people per 1,000 crimes - Spain just FOUR times that number. QED. Thanks to journalist Leo McKinstry for this information in the Daily Express 3/9/07.

Who needs help?

As a christian, I am always anxious to see the needy given help. I actively support a number of charities. My problem is that I strongly disapprove of helping those unwilling to help themselves.I object to the state granting extra provision for pensioners who have not attempted to provide for old age themselves. To me it is morally reprehensible that the state should attempt to raise their living standards to the same level as those who have taken care throughout life, often making significant sacrifices in order to be in that position. It is simple fairness.This is complicated as an issue but there should be evidence that the government is at least attempting to address the matter.At the same time I am horrified by the conditions in which some pensioners - possibly those who have been on very low wages throughout life - have to live.All very difficult - but it must be sorted. Similarly, I want to help the unemployed but if there is no job 'of the right type available' I believe you should have to take any job until you are in a position to choose. Jobs must be allocated - and accepted. This would mean that the simplistic arguments "We need immigrants to do the jobs our people won't do" becomes an immediate dead letter.
As previously mentioned, I favour limiting the amount of unemployment benefits available during a lifetime. I am desperate to help the disabled but even there, unless the disability is extreme, I feel that they should be found suitable work. We are currently a society built on excuses. We help all sorts of people not worthy of help and I do not believe that Jesus was ever a supporter of the wanton and the feckless.
We must become more discriminating.

Fear.

When those well-meaning architects of the Welfare State in the 1940s, Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskell, Attlee and Beveridge to name but a few, were speaking of 'the cradle to the grave', they envisaged a world without fear; a new utopia where the unemployed would gain a fair deal and the sick would never want for care. Heady ideals indeed.
Sadly not so. Tragically - this became an encouragement for the grabbers, the feckless and the abusers of benefits. On the topic of graves, you wonder if these excellent men might not now be turning in theirs.
We live in an age where you have no fear if you are arrested, prosecuted or dealt with by a court.
We live in an age where you have no fear if you choose to be unemployed.
We live in an age where you have no fear if you deliberately lose a job.
We live in an age where, however reprehensible your behaviour at work, you need have no fear as it is almost impossible to be sacked.
We live in an age where, if you get into debt through stupidity or fecklessness, you need have no fear of the consequences of your actions.
We live in an age where, if your promiscuity leads to disease or pregnancy, you need have no fear.
You need not fear police, teachers, prison officers, magistrates, judges or even prison itself.
You need not fear if you butcher others as you will never have your own life threatened.
I am sure that you could add many more to the list.
It may sound strange to say, but a society without fear is a bad society. All must be aware of the consequences of their actions.

Ironically, many decent people fear to leave their houses or go out after dark.
In a spiritual sense we are ultimately answerable to God but in a civic sense we are likely to have our bad behaviour 'understood' and excused.
Eliminate all fear and you end up with the mess we see today.

PSALM 111:10. "The Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."

Photo: Lord Beveridge.

It's that man again.

Peter Hitchens understands. He is a realist. Thank the Lord for Christians in high places who have some grasp of what life is now like.
In The Mail on Sunday, he stated:
"Fear, not reason or appeals to decency, is the only thing that affects the new breed of feral teen. He doesn't know what reason or decency are and it is too late to explain to him."

[In a later article, I shall be examining the issue of 'fear' in the modern world.]

LINK: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/mailonsunday.html?in_article_id=476202&in_page_id=1791

Advert.

All present problems - Solved!


The lurid thriller designed to be given to non-Christians! [ My Minister's wife said it should be made into a film!]


Review:

"The Unassuming Assassin" is the psychological tale of an ordinary man's unrelenting crusade against violent criminals. The story begins with a brutal slaying which, for Mel Roberts, avenges the death of his daughter. From this point on, Mel investigates the rationale behind his action at the same time as he embarks on a journey of spiritual self-discovery and an investigation of the Christian Faith. The violence escalates and changes in nature as he attempts to clear up all the social chaos caused by political midgets. Against a backcloth of political lunacy and wild experimentation with a novel form of transportation, he often seems the only voice of sanity until we meet Detective Inspector Jerry Kemp. Are Mel's actions inevitable? If not him, would it have been somebody else? Why does Mel act as he does? Is he a multiple killer because he has a psychological and spiritual defect or is it because of the failures of successive governments to protect its citizens from violent criminals? Where do our sympathies lie? The novel helps bring parts of Sheffield and Scunthorpe area to life. This is a tale which shows a cabinet rocked by the social disintegration its policies and those of its predecessors have caused. Across all of this, the novel is also a simple love story. For those who enjoy a tale with twists and turns - satisfaction is guaranteed.







LINK TO AMAZON:-http://www.amazon.com/Unassuming-Assassin-Arnott/dp/1846850258/sr=11-1/qid=1162554090/ref=sr_11_1/104-0242889-4639929





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Pregnant pause?

Overheard in Exeter Hospital when a heavily pregnant woman approached reception wondering why there were no signs to the Maternity Ward.
"We are not allowed to call it that - it is now Women's Health."
AAAAAAAghhhh! I do hope that such idiotic PC nonsense will not reproduce itself!
If it ain't PC - it is 'trendy' which can often be even worse!
Is this now a national cause for annoyance?

Who is responsible.

For years I have opposed the idea of parents being held criminally responsible for the actions of their offspring. It is patently unfair that a parent should be taken to court for what their child has been up to out of their sight. Furthermore, some parents can literally be afraid of their children.
Nonetheless, the time has arrived. Fair or totally unjust, it is absolutely essential that this be brought to pass.
If the law is not going to be applied rigorously to hundreds of thousands of feral youths - and we have some 'do-gooders' wanting the age of criminal responsibility raised to 18 !!!! - then we have to target the parents both criminally and civilly.
Parents MUST be made to ensure that they know precisely what their children are doing, where they are doing it and with whom - at all times. If they do not there must be a price to pay. If you have children, you must take the responsibility. You must realise that if you bring them up to disrespect others or you casually hope that "everything will turn out okay" then both children and parents should be punished when this goes wrong.
The trouble is, it might work with the currently decent but weak and vaguely well-meaning parents who simply need a kick up the rear but the hardcore underclass will simply ignore it safe in the knowledge that serious fines will not be imposed; if they are, they will be remitted by subsequent courts and they will not be jailed for non-payment as "They had not committed the original crime."
All this really does my 'ed in!

Quote-I-Like.

IF THE EU WAS THE ANSWER, IT MUST HAVE BEEN A STUPID QUESTION!

Incredible. ASBOs to become more pathetic,

On the 6th of November, I published an article based on my experiences of the countless failures of that exercise in expensive pointlessness known as the ASBO.
This week, it is revealed that The Sentencing Advisory Panel wishes to make the punishments for abusing ASBOs even weaker.
I DESPAIR!
When will these buffoons learn, for the sake of all pity?
"Crime has increased? - Oh, let's reduce sentencing!"
These kinds of social subversives have been doing the likes of this increasingly for 50+ years and over that period crime has increased eleven fold.
They are utterly barking!

Ten what?

If God were a liberal He would not have given us 10 Commandments but rather, 10 Suggestions!

Out now!

With a 3% expectation of death in a 6 month tour of Afghastlystan, the death rates for our brave troops exceeds casualties in any conflict since World War 2; worse than the Falklands Campaign, it is even worse than what happened to the Americans in Vietnam.
If there were some kind of point to it all it would perhaps be acceptable.
There isn't and it isn't!

LINK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=475213&in_page_id=1811

Coelocanths

Coelocanths are an ugly fish which became extinct over 60 million years ago according to evolutionists. Finding them still alive and well does not disprove evolution at all BUT it does show how badly evolutionists get it wrong. [Embarrassing little critters, aren't they?]
They have been caught regularly since the 1930s the most recent off Indonesia as reported by BBC News Online on the 1st of August.

How Long Do We Have? [Thanks for this, Stan]

About the time the original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply Cannot exist as a permanent form of government."
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years." "During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

3. From courage to liberty;

4. From liberty to abundance;

5. From abundance to complacency;

6. From complacency to apathy;

7. From apathy to dependence;

8. From dependence back into bondage"

I think that means that we have passed Number Seven and are plunging headlong into Eight.

Interesting facts. - Thanks, Stan.

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Population of counties won by:
Gore: 127 million
Bush: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Gore: 13.2
Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country.

Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..."

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

Crime causes traffic congestion.

Had you ever thought how much traffic congestion is caused by governmental failures to deal with crime?

Well. Had you noticed just how great the reduction is in traffic at two points in the day when children are on school holidays?

Had you ever wondered why so many children who live within easy walking distance of their school are ferried by Mum on the 'school run'?

To an extent this is one more example of the pampering of current youngsters but in countless cases it is out of a pure and reasonable fear for their safety.

[I had both of my sons violently attacked on the streets when teenage perpetrators were left unpunished.]

'Get tough on crime and aid the environment!'

I think that is a pretty good slogan.

Adultery?

I return to the story in John's Gospel of 'The Woman Taken in Adultery' as it is probably the most misunderstood Christian text of all time.
If used as an example against the death penalty by the liberal church - as it frequently is - then logically it must also apply to ALL punishment.
If Jesus let her off with a warning, then we must expect similar treatment for arsonists and rapists - you cannot be arbitrary if you follow this as an example.
Similarly, in order to understand the story, you have to accept how heinous an offence adultery was in that society; they grasped its seriousness. Today, we miss the point when we consider it a minor aberration.
Many see the story as a mere test of Jesus's compassion when it is actually a dangerous trap to see whether he would endorse Jewish Law or Roman authority.
Many assume that the woman had indeed committed adultery - but had she? If so, even in a sexist society demanding witnesses, we are entitled to ask - "Where was the man?"
The story is announced as a trap at the outset so why do we assume that the adultery had actually taken place? Who was it who declared that it had? - The enemies of Jesus.
When Jesus told her "To sin no more", what was the sin? Adultery? More likely it was her involvement in the trap!
Many miss the rather obvious point that Jesus DID authorise her execution surely knowing that his "Let the one without sin cast the first stone" would put the ball back into their court.
Had Jesus said simply "Stone her" undoubtedly the pharisees and co would have had to pull the plug on the entire farce at that juncture.
A complex story oft used in a most facile manner. I have heard it preached four times and in three of those the preacher majored on the 'compassion of Christ' - if exemplified in this story, it is at best, peripheral.

Apathy.

Policies and manifestos are one thing but it would be foolish to believe that any more than a tiny minority actually bother to find out the differences - both perceived and real - between the different parties prior to casting their votes.

I am the first to complain about labour reneging on its manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the proposed EU Treaty [on the rather dodgy grounds that there are 4 % differences between this and the abandoned CONstitution] nonetheless, I must admit that the number of labour voters who had actually spotted this at the point of voting is going to be negligible.

Since when have votes been cast based on policies? In a country where a bald man, we are told, has no hope of election, we may have to conclude that this generation of voters which is overseeing the dismantling of hundreds of years of freedoms because of its apathy is going to get the kind of nation it deserves. What cannot be argued is that generations yet unborn deserve to enter life under the totalitarian regime which, notch by notch, small step by small step, the EU is becoming.

If you are naive enough to trust our elected 'representatives' or you cannot be bothered to find out what is going on in the real world - it is all YOUR fault!

Butterflies.

I am afraid that it has been a really poor season for butterflies. We annoy the neighbours by having enormous amounts of buddleia in our front garden to help feed a wide variety. This year - all to no avail.

If you really want to hack off an evolutionist, you must ask them to explain the evolutionary process whereby an egg becomes a caterpillar, then a pupa and then undergoes a metamorphosis into a butterfly or moth.
Believe me - the colour they go is worth a king's ransom. There is no logical sequence whereby this might have occurred via natural selection - just one more amongst myriads of unexplainables for the dedicated evolutionist to get his/her knickers in a twist about.

Source: "Inexplicable insect metamorphosis." by Daniel Devine.Creation magazine Volume 29, Number 3, Page 31.

Willi.

Have you heard of Willi Muenzenberg? He was one of the most influential men of the 20th Century. - "But how could he be - it is a name I have never encountered," do I hear you say?
Well, Willi would have liked that. He was Stalin's chief propagandist and the 'father' of all Blair's spin doctors - he really was 'the daddy of them all'!
As Stephen Koch, author of Double Lives wrote in the New Criterion:
"He wanted to instil the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility." [Overtones of Leonard Schapiro as previously quoted on this Blog]

He wrote the 'Brown Books' which contained pure lies which are quoted as if they are history to this very day. It was Willi who first began the demonisation of the USA. It was indeed his work and ultimately that of his acolytes which was to lead to the vicious Hollywood campaign against the so-called McCarthy witch-hunts.
We all know 'as fact' that the anti-communist McCarthy was 'a vicious rightwinger who wanted to take away the democratic rights of actors and similar to be left of centre'.
The trouble is that McCarthy was almost always spot on with his accusations of 'planted communists in positions of influence'. This is the bit which always gets left out - [the real propaganda success] when in fact the senator was more anti-extremist than extremist himself. [Always portray reason as being unreasonable!]
Of course, nowadays we are largely impervious to such matters. In this country it is expected that a large number of politicians, media beavers and members of the 'liberal elite' will be working constantly to undermine our rights to democracy, freedom and self-determination.

Handwriting?

Junior schoolchildren were told to copy lines of a Muslim prayer - for handwriting practice.
The Call To Prayer copied by ten-year-olds at Newlands Primary School in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, included the lines "Allah is the greatest" and "there is no god but Allah".
I do hope that nobody suggests that "I am the way, the truth and the life" would not be given to Muslim children for practice - that would be racist and just designed to stir up hatred.

LINK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=473401&in_page_id=1770

'A' Levels.

I do wonder if the 'A' Level results this year will be "the best ever."
No matter that reports indicate dilution of two full grades during Tony's tenure; no matter that the grade boundaries are drawn after the marks are all in; no matter that when my eldest son was doing his Masters Degree 11 years ago he was able to discover that much of the university work he was doing had formerly been completed by the end of 'A' Levels.
The trouble is, that you cannot say these things when the results have just come out as you are accused of 'belittling the achievements of young people'.
So. I am getting in early!

In the first half of my 'A' level teaching career my results were okay. In the second half, every other grade was an 'A'. My teaching hadn't changed!

Frozen food.

For many years, with a heavy mortgage, young children, with an extremely limited pension facing us and having to put a considerable percentage of monies aside as provision for retirement, our family's disposable income was often very low. For years my wife worked as a Head Teacher unpaid and later for just a few pounds a week. We have not had a respectable income for the more than 17 years.
In order to renew a car or take an occasional holiday it has been necessary to budget, make-do-and-mend and do without many things.
Our mortgage is now paid off. Our savings are in a house in Spain and for the first time in my life, I have no financial worries. [No doubt Gordon Brown-think will require taxation to severely punish me for decades of living carefully. It is annoying. ]
The point of this article however, is to speak about Dalewood Frozen Foods - a small store in Sheffield 9 - one of the very poorest parts of Sheffield, and indeed northern England. It has now been departed for well over six years but when we were struggling financially, it was a real God send.
It was a small frozen food shop which sold high quality, branded goods, typically at a quarter the price of the same in Morrisons which was then located 150 yards away.
The packaging was damaged, other than that - all was perfect. I would often half fill a freezer for a fiver.
What a social triumph to have such an outfit in an area where so many people had so few funds. Indeed! Except that almost all went to Morrisons as a preference to buy perfect packaging and for the dubious delights of having a one stop shop. My financial salvation was never crowded. It eventually closed down due to lack of interest.
If poverty were genuine, there would have been a chain of such shops across the UK.
Can anybody imagine a similar fate for such a shop having occurred in the 1930s?

Channel 4 Dispatches.

Well done Channel 4! Well done indeed Dispatches.

You attack Israel for defending itself.

You attack Christianity.

You promote Dawkins.

This time you are not just promoting Islam - but you are giving a pulpit to Abu Mohammed - a man so extreme that even this lily-livered government will not allow him into the country.
Fortunately, you seem to have got away with it as he had nothing offensive to say - unless people want to get all smallminded about muslims defending the London bombings on our TV screens!

Faith is not opinion.

The word 'faith' is often misused to mean a 'vague and largely unprovable belief'. It gives rise to a rather bizarre image of somebody sitting, with a rather strained appearance on their face which is largely indistinguishable from a bout of constipation.
"I AM going to believe in the impossible."
Sadly, this sort of faith tends to avoid all rational thinking and logic and is a fairly natural consequence of a cultural desire to believe in something for which you have no empirical evidence. It is shallow and devoid of anything other than a facade of alleged spirituality. It is also temporary.
Fortunately, Christianity does not have any such problem as it is all about an actual relationship between man and his Creator.
Certainly Christianity requires a leap into the unknown named as a 'step of faith'. This will only be attempted when somebody has seen the attractions of the Christ and is prepared to take a risk in committing their life to Him.
When that has been done you experience the Living Lord and so 'straining faith' is no longer needed. Keeping Him close through prayer and worship and reading His word and His reality will remain with you.
Believing in the existence of God is not what faith is about - even the demons believe in His existence.
Like the leper in Mark 1. He had a belief that Jesus was for real and could help him. This is believing faith - in many ways the same as knowledge. [Check out Hebrews 11 on the matter.] Of course, the leper did not know whether Jesus would heal him or not and had to ask.
You cannot be a Christian without knowing Jesus. Anything else and all He becomes is a mere opinion.

Failures in languages.

The Daily Mail item which stated that adults only tend to recall some seven words of an entire foreign language studied in school is of little surprise to me.
When I took 'O' levels in French and Spanish back in 1968, I estimate that I had needed a vocabulary of some 2,000 words. 'A' levels in 1970 required about 8,000 in each to achieve university standard grades - before we even consider grammar.
When I trained to teach languages in 1974/5 I was horrified to find that 'memory was being abolished' as it was 'not a particularly important part of education'.
Well, I finished teaching languages this year and what a long and miserable struggle it has been. Had I not gone part time in 1990, I feel that I could not have survived.
If children are not required to use their memory to a significant degree across the curriculum, it is to be expected that languages, which must have a large body of active rather than passive knowledge, will be regarded as a particularly difficult option by most pupils.
I have taught other subjects to examination level and they are utter simplicity by comparison.
What the experimenters with education have done to damage children in the last forty + years fills me with absolute horror.


LINK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=472704&in_page_id=1770

Phillips v Dawkins.

Mr Arrogance, sometimes referred to as Professor Richard Dawkins, that well known I-believe-in-scientific-method-but-only-so-long-as-I-do-not-have-to-justify-any-of-my-own-scientific-beliefs atheist, has now launched an attack on the whole of New Age spiritualist claptrap.
He is a man I pray for specifically every single day, so I am pleased to see that he has at least got something right.
But as Melanie Phillips - somebody who almost always does get it right - notes, it is the very collapse of belief systems which has led to an angst-led search through all this pseudo spiritual pap for people who have been abandoned in a Godless vacuum.
She quotes Chesterton's "When a man stops believing in God - it is not that he believes in nothing but that he will believe in anything." Oh, so true.

LINK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=473347&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=256&in_check=N

Hostages.

S. Korean aid workers kidnapped in Afghastlystan? - Well, that is what almost all news reports are saying.
Funny how the word 'Christian' keeps getting left out, isn't it? - Particularly when their Pastor has already been slaughtered by the Taliban!

Prayer required.

Poverty, poverty knock.

Could we please have a ban on the all too common, absurd claims that x numbers of people in the UK are 'living in poverty'?
Could we not instead, have an independent review body which does not use the dubious claims of relative poverty in order to justify spurious assumptions to make leftwing political points?
We need a clear definition of what poverty is to which all fairminded people might subscribe.
We already have: clean water; removal of sewage; food; access to medical care; local and guaranteed education; benefits when out of work; almost negligible numbers living on the streets.
Where the average salary is £100k per annum, the person on £60k is living in poverty. This is simply ridiculous and why relative poverty as a concept is useless and why it has multitudes of definitions.
Try telling my son who worked for a medical care charity in Malawi that we have poverty in this nation and he just laughs.
Children in horrific conditions? - Of course there are, but this is from neglect and not poverty. I have lived in a slum clearance area in Sheffield and the 'impoverished adults' drank, smoked and would not today dream of wearing a £5 pair of jeans instead of Levis; they shop carelessly without deigning to buy 'own brands'. Many take drugs, have made themselves deliberately unemployable and pray for any minor medical condition which will put them on enhanced benefits for life.
That some young women use child-bearing as a career choice is undeniable.
I would claim that many of the problems arrive from a benefit-driven society which takes responsibility for themselves away from far too many individuals who are encouraged to become feckless.
America has had a number of states which have restricted the number of benefits citizens may draw in a lifetime and the results have been astonishing. Unemployment has plummeted as people recognise that they cannot leech from society over a sustained period.
Melanie Phillips perhaps puts it best:
The high-minded, Quaker Rowntrees would undoubtedly have grasped in an instant the point behind this apparent paradox: that a post-religious culture consumed by materialism has simply lost its moral bearings along with its soul.
And they would probably also have seen that, unlike the great social reformers of the Victorian era for whom the alleviation of poverty was a religious and moral crusade, today's equivalent activists have systematically refused to acknowledge that holding people responsible for the consequences of their own actions lies at the heart of any effective anti-poverty programme.

A river ran through it.

Visualise a mountain range some 100 miles long and anything up to 10,000' high. Now imagine a river approaching it from a right angle and carving a gradual passage through the very centre of that range to create a water gap through which the river can eventually run freely at the base of those mountains.
I think you can agree with me that such a process of gradual erosion through solid rock would probably take many millions of years to achieve, even where we are only talking in hundreds of feet.
One tiny little problem however - so small I almost hesitate to mention it - the idea is complete and utter tommy rot.
We have been sold a pup. We have been presented with an idea which only sounds logical but is far from being so.
Stop and ask yourself how water actually works outside non-evolutionary fantasies. Well, does a river approach solid rock and start planning ahead by millions of years OR does it flow all around the base of the mountains using a combination of gravity and the line of least resistance? If you ask a uniformitarian geologist, they have to go onto the defensive and postulate a host of highly unlikely scenarios which become increasingly desperate and unbelievable.
A simple proof that uniformitarian geology is a load of you-know-what.
What really happened do I hear you ask? - Ah well. The river as a torrent forced its way through - probably in a matter of days when the rock was soft and it was the least resistant point.
Long age geology - 100% wrong - and the believable model rather more in line with a different deluge and a considerably reduced timeline.
Remember that glaciation - another idea abused by long time period geologists is not an issue here.
Consider also the shape of these gaps. Look at the photo. Now ask yourself why the gap is a wide vee shape.
Surely it would be more logical to have sheer sides or even a tunnel. You cannot argue that the water 'has been going through the upper reaches for longer' because the river 'drops' as it allegedly erodes.

SOURCES:
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5064 Michael Oard. MSc. "Do rivers erode through mountains?"

"The Missoula flood controversy and the Genesis flood." Michael Oard. CRS Monograph 13.

The photo is of the Snake River.

The dustbin of history.

The History Channel has never been known to miss out on any opportunity to be controversial. At one point or another, any and every tinpot theory, conspiracy or otherwise, will manage to get airtime.

At the moment, it is jumping onto the Dan Brown-style bandwagon and is asking why such rubbish as The Gospel of Judas did not make it into the Bible. Well:-

1} Check out the dates on these leftovers and most originate in the fourth century although attempted gnostic corruptions can be traced to the first - where it is trounced by the New Testament writers - people who knew Jesus by and large, as well as Paul who experienced Him.

2} The Nag Hammadi 'gospels' reflect this and do not appear in the canon of scripture because they utterly contradict it and have no basis for that contradiction other than the desire to corrupt or control! The joy of the New Testament is that so much of it is clearly personal experience from people there at the time. Naturally enough, they dumped the rubbish.

3} The Gospel of Judas is found in coptic in the 4th century and there is no evidence of an earlier Greek version. Moreover, it contains a Mickey Mouse theology never represented before the second half of the second century.

4} The gnostic 'gospel' of Thomas is part of the Nag Hammadi findings and is certainly very very complete but is all from the 2nd Century when we have considerable evidence of the real Gospels coming from the First Century.

[It is like me writing a fictional account of a day in the life of Disraeli, when I know nothing of Disraeli - and yet my version is accepted as the truth ahead of the writings of genuine historians!]

'Thomas' however is not even a gospel at all. It contains no narrative elements whatsoever and is merely a collection of attributed sayings - some of which might even contain an element of truth - the best lies always do! There is little more effective than quotations used out of their original context. Consider those who have tried to make Churchill into somebody who would have welcomed today's EU. Perish the thought!

5} If God is omnipotent, why would He allow us two thousand years with a corrupted truth? Clearly, all such attacks are from non-believers - those who have failed to experience the Risen Christ. The Enemy is nothing if not subtle.

The main point is this. If, two thousand years from today, a pseudo historian were to find a Book of Mormon, the written ramblings of Kim Il Myung Sun Moon and virtually any example of Watch Tower literature then compare these to the Bible, he could make the same spurious arguments:

"The Church has wickedly suppressed these truths."

The reality however, is that we put rubbish in a bin and do not expect it to be used against us centuries later.

Returning with a rant.

I am returning with a rant. For once, there are no sources, no quotations nor measured arguments coz...


I HATE AIRLINES! I ALSO HATE AIRPORTS!



Today, my good lady and I have been treated like cattle by airport authorities; treated like a tramp with halitosis at a posh party by an airline; scrunched into seats designed by a moron; ignored; delayed kept uninformed and robbed of certain legitimate goods on the basis of a nonsensical regulation allegedly supposed to prevent acts of terror.


A great holiday with the edge taken off it at the last gasp.


[No. We weren't even going via one of the London airports.]