From The Illustrated Uxbridge English Dictionary

ductile [ˈdʌktaɪl]

 Noun: A tile with a duck on it.

Image courtesy of Nemo's great uncle's Flikr stream. Silliness courtesy of The Uxbridge English Dictionary.

Church of St Peter and St Paul, Newport Pagnell

At night to Newport Pagnell; and there a good pleasant country- town, but few people in it. A very fair — and like a Cathedral — Church; and I saw the leads, and a vault that goes far under ground, and here lay with Betty Turner’s sparrow: the town, and so most of this country, well watered.

From The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 8 June 1668

Image courtesy of Ned Trifle's Flikr stream 

The 99% were 'just asking for it'

It started with the banking crisis of 2008. A myth has grown up that 99 per cent of us were innocent in that, and have been forced to bail out the guilty 1 per cent. Actually, a majority of us were probably borrowing more than we should, and we can't just blame the banks for forcing the money into our hands, or the politicians for failing to regulate them. 

Writes Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent. I'm sick of hearing this sort of pious nonsense about how we are all being miserable sinners who should turn the other cheek and forgive the bankstas and the politicians who told us that There Is No Alternative because we're all, in a very real sense, just as guilty as our abusers.

No we're bloody well not.

I wasn't borrowing more than I should have been, (due to a combination of instinctive risk aversion and dumb luck), but many of those who were didn't think they were being reckless. With house prices climbing further into the stratosphere with every passing year, many people took what they thought was a calculated risk to get an eye-watering mortgage, rather than wait until the tiniest starter home was way out of their reach. The poor saps believed the politicians and financiers who swore that everything in the market was for the best, now that we'd arrived in best of all possible economic worlds. Not to mention being ground down by the relentless hard sell of commission-hungry debt salesmen and the soft soap of the Property Ladder promise of securing your future by canny property speculation.

'But we all voted for the politicians who failed to regulate the banks, so it's our fault, isn't it?' This highly disingenuous claim would only hold water if we seriously assumed that a significant proportion of the population avidly hung on to the newsreaders' every word about the the state of the Hang Seng, the Dow Jones, the Nikkei and DAX, without their eyes glazing over, took a subscription to the Economist and actually had a clue about complex financial engineering, then, in full knowledge of what was going on, recklessly voted for politicians who they knew were negligently ignoring a coming crisis.

They didn't. Even an obsessive economics wonk like Gordon Brown got it memorably wrong, so it's a bit rich to turn round and blame the average guy or gal next door for not knowing about the problems of over-leveraged financial institutions, the US sub-prime market, collateralized debt obligations and sovereign debt. Not to mention the fact that politicians don't always deliver what they promise at election time - just ask anybody who voted Lib Dem last time round.

The argument that we all share the guilt because nearly everyone is in some sort of pension scheme which benefited, in the good years, from financial jiggery-pokery, this is just another unwarranted assumption about how well informed informed consumers are.

How may normal people have a clear idea of how their pensions work? If your eyes don't grow heavy when somebody starts going on about pension provision, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I've no idea whether my pittance of a works pension is invested in Italian government debt, pork bellies, ostrich farms, none of the above or all of them. Most of us just signed the dotted line and hoped that the out pension provider wasn't actively ripping us off, out of some vague idea that having a pension would be less likely to leave us destitute than just stuffing any spare cash under a mattress and hoping for the best.

Power and knowledge matter. The rest of us don't share the guilt of those who knew what was going on or had the power to change things. We weren't 'asking for it', any more than the rape victim who's accused of contributory negligence just because she wore a short skirt on the night in question. No ifs, no buts, no excuses.

Burn his body from his head

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. 

Pope Benedict XVI

Now's the time of year when we get together, in a spirit of Christian tolerance, to celebrate those good 'ol cultural expressions and traditional values. All together, now:

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow
By God's providence he was catched
With a dark lantern and burning match
Holloa boys, holloa boys
God save the King!
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!

A penny loaf to feed ol' Pope
A farthing cheese to choke him
A pint of beer to rinse it down
A faggot of sticks to burn him
Burn him in a tub of tar
Burn him like a blazing star
Burn his body from his head
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!

Makes you proud, doesn't it?

It is no exaggeration to say that civilisation itself is indebted to our Christian heritage. As Johnston writes “Impartial law and politics are near to the very essence of principled civilised communal living. From such study came the democratic ideal of representative Government, with universal adult suffrage and regular elections. This in turn is founded upon concepts of accountability and human dignity, which themselves derive from the Biblical view of man made in the image of God. It is no accident that these ideals emerged in the Christian West (and nowhere else), a civilisation uniquely tamed and moulded by the Gospel.”

Happy bonfire night, everybody!

So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen

I see Liz Jones, queen of the censorius net-curtain-twitching journalistic busybodies, has taken time out from sticking her disapproving nose into other people's private grief and decided to put some of her own dirty linen on public display. And, by gum, it's mucky!*


*The blog Carmen Gets Around ended in 2013, so if you if you go to www.carmenego.com, you'll find there's nothing to see here ... move along... I've threfore therefore updated the link which now takes you to the version archived on on the Wayback Machine (you'll have to scroll down a little way for Carmen's takedown of Liz Jones' article "The craving for a baby that drives women to the ultimate deception").

Engage warp drive, Dr. Dan!

Simpletons with a little spare money and a vague sense of unease about life may wish to try one out of the many new-agey spiritual entrepreneurs who specialise in lightening clients' spirits, and wallets. I don't recommend it myself, but if you really must give all your spare cash to a self-appointed guru, you could do worse than Dr. Dan Mathews, whose web site I stumbled upon by accident the other day. This guy is quality. Hell, you could tick every box on a New Age Bullshit Bingo card before reaching the end of his awesome first paragraph:

Dr. Dan Mathews had a near death experience in August of 1992. On the other side of the veil he was ordained into the priesthood of Melchizedek and was given specific information about the “paradigms” which are defined as the level of consciousness that exists on earth. He was told that since the original downfall of man only three paradigms or realities had existed: one which began at the dawn of time, the second beginning with Abraham and the third emerged during the life of Jesus. Dr. Dan was told that beginning in 2003 humanity would enter into a warp-speed evolution of consciousness by moving through another twelve new paradigms of consciousness.

After Dr. Dan was given this information he was gifted with HOLY DIVINE HEALING. He was instructed to return to his body and use this gift by helping people reconnect to the parts of their soul which have been fragmented since the dawn of time and move gracefully through shifting paradigms with a complete connection to the God Presence within. Since this experience in 1992 Dr. Dan has assisted many people in their transitions through one-on –one sessions completed in person or by phone, group healings and lectures...

Dr. Dan’s private appointments are dedicated to your personal situation and are approximately 30 minutes each. The pricing is a sliding scale $85 -$148 and payment is reflective of your feeling toward the service. Cash is preferred. 

Bargain! Sign up here. Dr. Dan also does group sessions (subject to a minimum 'love offering' of $35). I wonder if he does spiritual development courses, too?

Seriously, though, is this stuff any more bonkers than mainstream religion? Try to make sense of the doctrine of the Trinity. The BBC has tried to explain:

The idea that there is One God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit means:

• There is exactly one God
• The Father is God
• The Son is God
• The Holy Spirit is God
• The Father is not the Son
• The Son is not the Holy Spirit
• The Father is not the Holy Spirit

An alternate way of explaining it is:

• There is exactly one God
• There are three really distinct Persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
• Each of the Persons is God

Common mistakes

The Trinity is not

• Three individuals who together make one God
• Three Gods joined together
• Three properties of God

What the hell's all that supposed to mean? Maybe a diagram would help:

No, it all still looks like complete balderdash to me (although it's considered rude to suggest that believing in a complex set of assertions without the benefit of any supporting evidence might just be a bit silly).

Whatever. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to connect with the God Presence within by moving gracefully through some shifting paradigms at warp factor 5. All love offerings gratefully recieved (cash or PayPal only, please).

The Occupy protesters can’t win

Here’s a bit more fact checking, this time from fullfact.org. Guardian journalists have been disputing the Telegraph’s claim that only one in ten Occupy London protesters at St. Paul's actually occupied in their tents overnight. In this case, it looks as if nobody has definitively proved or disproved the original assertion. There are clearly a few facts to be nailed down here, to do with the sensitivity of the equipment, the time when it was used, whether tents been occupied for long enough to grow warm and show up on the equipment being used, (depending on how sensitively it was calibrated), etc, etc. Those facts are simply facts, regardless of your point of view.

What interests me here, though, is the way the disputed facts are framed, and how sections of the media feel free to dismiss and marginalise the protesters for doing one thing and for doing the opposite.

I don’t know what the real occupancy rates are in the encampment, but there are two ends of the possibility spectrum.

At one end of the spectrum, if there’s any truth to the Telegraph’s story, people aren’t camped out 24/7, but coming and going, presumably because they’ve got other pressing things in their lives to attend to, such as jobs, study, family, etc. At the other end, maybe there are protesters there all the time, people without such constraints who could conceivably be more-or-less full-time protesters; students with some flexibility to their schedule, perhaps skipping the odd lecture, the jobless, spoiled trustafarians and other family-supported well-off kids who don’t have a job to go to and so on.

It seems to me that some sections of the media have framed the debate so that the protesters can’t win. If they’re not full-time, hard-core protesters, sleeping out night after night, they’re dismissed as lightweights who don’t have the courage of their convictions and their protest is rubbished as a hypocritical publicity stunt without any real commitment behind it. If they are on the street night after night, then they’re dismissed as members of a jobless work-shy rent-a-mob with too much time on their hands, who can only afford to spend their lives protesting because they don’t have anything more productive to do.

 Catch-22 lives.*

*If this sounds familiar, just think about all the anti-immigrant stories you've read in the papers over the years. Bloody foreigners, coming over here and stealing our benefits. What, they're working? Bloody foreigners coming over here, stealing our jobs....