An evening with the Bishops ....

Last night was spent at the Abbey with our Diocesan and Bishop Mary of El Camino Real. In a wonderful Eucharist Bishop Mary Presided at the High Altar and over a hundred people crowded into the Quire to share in this important celebration. Now, I have to confess that I had some severe reservation about woman Bishops and about the impact on the wider Christian community, but I will say this, if the women who become bishops in the next few years are in the model of +Mary, the Church will be the richer for it.

The press has made much of the controversy within the American branch of the Anglican Communion and talked up the opposition from Africa and the Archbishop of Sydney among others, but it is noticeable that they make no mention of the good work and the growth that is occuring in the US. While I suspect that many will still have difficulty with the concept of women in Orders, it is worth noting that the role of women as we have had it has more to do with the strife between the Gnostic philosophy and the Trinitarian understanding of the Apostles. In fact, there is a strong suggestion that women were in ordained roles including the bishopric, in the first three centuries.

I'm pretty sure that this debate is far from over, and even that I am likely to encounter someone in the bishopric who will raise serious doubts in my mind and possibly even give my faith a serious challenge. But I hope that will be the exception.

Pictures at an exhibition .....

Mausi can always be relied on to produce top quality pictures when we visit places and her pictures at Chatham are a case in point. She captured several on HMS Gannet that give a really good feel for what the ship is like. My little Fuji Finepix camera does a reasonable job, but doesn't have the capability of Mausi's much more sophisticated rig. It doesn't have an operator with the skill or the eye for a great shot either!

This picture, taken from the Quarterdeck, nicely shows the whole length of the ship. The raised

 bulwarks are pierced for small guns and topped with the hammock 'nettings' in which the crew were required to stow their hammocks during the day. These also provided some protection under fire for the deck crew from small ar

ms fire and splinters from shells.

Travelling with my Iranian students and friends gave plenty of opportnities for some fun pictures and Nasir wanted this picture with a 'knight' at Chepstow Castle. 

The arrow is from a longbow and the 'knight' is using a sword, having just demonstrated that it could be used in a number of creatively different ways to maim, kill or simply injure an opponent. 

The enthusiasm with which these guys threw themselves into every new experience was hugely amusing and very, very worthwhile.

Everything was photographed by them, camera phone, pocket camera and, of course, Mausi's lens caught a lot of the fun.

The top of the Abbey tower proved to be a perfect opportunity for lots of pictures of the surrounding town and of each other. Hard work answering all the questions and keeping up with all the excitement as they explored.

But, for me, the best time was being with Mausi as we explored some of our favourite things and places.  

Like this unusual shot across the transepts which captures the top of the Grove organ and looks across at the Milton. Not a view that many people can get to see, but one we both enjoyed.

Pandemics.....

The news at the moment is full of the Swine 'flu epidemic, though, from the numbers being published, "epidemic" is perhaps an abuse of the word. But that doesn't mean it won't become one. The great danger is of course in direct contact, person to person, or in being in close proximity to someone 'sharing' the virus with everyone else in close proximity. The closure of several schools in London is ample proof of the risk posed by children transferring the virus to their school chums.

But this is also where our current campaign by politicians and greenies is setting us up for the best possible transfer of the virus and its spread. Yes, I am having a go at the campaign to drive us all into mass transport systems and out of our cars. The buses are probably marginally better ventilated and therefore less infectious than the trains, which also tend to carry larger numbers and be more crowded. But London's Underground system has to be the most efficient environment for the transmission of Tuberculosis, Influenza and a wide range of other airborne bugs and diseases. I am reminded of this every time I have to travel on that system surrounded by coughing, sneezing or spitting fellow travellers. If you wanted to create a system guaranteed to promote a pandemic, packing the maximum number of people into a small poorly ventilated and poorly cleaned carriage in a tunnel ventilated by the movement of the train itself and you have it.

Looking back at the 18th and 19th Century living conditions in the UK, one is immediately struck by the fact that diseases tended to become epidemics very rapidly - because too many people shared too small a space in their homes, in the filthy streets and without proper sanitation. Even into the 20th Century tuberculosis was a major killer for the same reasons - and now it has made a strong return, and mass transport systems guarantee its spread. Someone actually needs to look carefully at this and, while I agree that 'public' transport is probably the only way to move the numbers of people we must in our cities, perhaps another strategy is needed to deal with the infection risks it brings.

But don't hold your breath, I can hear the civil servants already lining up to tell the relevant Ministers that it will cost too much and that it will annoy the Green Lobby or derail the Green Policy if they change anything. And frankly, the Ministers responsible, career politicians to a man and woman, haven't a clue anyway.

So let the pandemic roll, the government is all geared up to protect themselves and the rest of us can get sick. Some of my readers may recall a Treasury statement some years ago which argued that it was cheaper to kill people in fire than to rescue them and treat their injuries. They are a little more devious about it now, but the recent disclosure that they have spent millions on 'window dressing' for trying to show the emergency services can "mass decontaminate" thousands in a dirty bomb event is a case in point. The best defence against the spread of disease is prevention, but we are seeing precious little of that so far. In the meantime the lack of joined up thinking in Whitehall will allow the virus to spread rapidly through the transport system.

Makes me glad I don't have to use it anymore.  

To see ourselves as others see us ...

Earlier today I rang a friend in South Africa who is waiting to go into hospital for cranial surgery - again. We talked for quite a while - my telephone provider will be rubbing their hands in glee - and did quite a bit of catching up. Among many other things we discussed a few things from our childhood and here I had better explain that she came from the "upper crust" end of town and I came from very much the other end. We reminisced about our parents and some of the things we did as kids, very much centred on the Yacht Club our parents belonged too. Mine ran the Rescue Boat, hers owned and sailed yachts. The picture below is of me at the time of this story.


To my surprise she ventured that her father had always had a very high opinion of me even though he didn't approve of my parents. That left me a little nonplussed as I had never realised this and I asked why he would have had that view. She reminded me of an incident that had occured when I was around twelve. Her father's boat had capsized in a dangerous position. The Rescue Boat was already engaged in retrieving another boat and crew and so could not respond immediately. Her father's crew was a man with a disablity and, weighed down by a windcheater that had filled with water and couldn't be removed he couldn't clamber back into the boat, instead, he had swum to the short breakwater where he had managed to get a grip on a jutting piece of metal and hung on for his life.

As she talked I recalled the incident. No I didn't jump into the water and perform a brave rescue, I ran instead to fetch a life bouy and line, and then scrambled back over the foundation blocks of the breakwater to where I could throw this out to him. He grabbed it, got it under his arms, and managed to stay afloat. It was at this point that the Rescue Boat arrived and my parents retrieved him and the bouy - my attempt to pull him round to the blocks I was on had failed - and apparently it was thought that I had saved his life.

Now the funny thing about this is that I can recall the incident, I can even recall that there were a lot of boats in trouble that day which was why I hadn't been allowed to crew for one of them. I don't have any memory of anyone actually saying anything to me about my actions, though I recall my mother ticking me off for having gone onto the broken blocks along the base of the breakwater - something she considered very dangerous. Looking back I think it might have been nice if someone had actually said, "Well done."

Never mind, I seem to have made a career of dealing with other people's emergencies, so I guess it must have been in my blood anyway.

In the Brown stuff?

With a Cabinet Minister now breaking ranks and suggesting our PM isn't the all seeing, all knowing saviour his propaganda machine has spent all these Nu Labour years telling us he is one does wonder how they got away with it this long. Interestingly now the Online newsletter, Standpoint Online, carries an article by Nick Cohen. As someone who has an "inside" view of the media and the media people around Gordon Brown and the No 10 Propaganda machine what he reveals isn't pretty.

The tragedy as I see it is that those in the media who should have opened this particular dirty washing bag several years ago, didn't. I can only think that they didn't because they felt that anything which keeps this socialist regime in power is legitimate, a view that Gordon Brown and his gang of propaganda thugs obviously subscribe too. The simple truth is that the media is now run by and staffed by socialist propagandists who simply cannot bring themselves to admit that socialism is wrong headed and benefits only those who can finagle their way into positions of power inside the civil service or in any of the plethora of 'elected' jobs for the boys and party apparatchiks socialists always create.

All I can say is thank God for the likes of Guido Fawkes who blew the lid off this dirty government and exposed their sycophants in the mainstream media. It is fascinating to see just how desperately the news media are working to bolster up this vicious bunch and keep these socialist Fascists in power. Frankly, its disgraceful.

And, in case you wonder how I can describe Socialists as Fascists I would say that you need only to look at the manner in which this government has behaved in a dictatorial fashion, imposed ideological correctness, stifled debate and used propaganda to create a false and misleading picture of their opponents and you will get my drift. Neither should anyone forget that National Socialism is not somewhere on the extreme Right of politics - the political spectrum is a circle. Go far enough in either direction and you end up on the other side. That is what our present government has succeeded in doing.

Quoting Marx

Some time ago and on my old blog I posted a "quote" supposedly from Marx. Needless to say I soon had a very superior commenter pointing out that the quote is in fact not from Das Kapital at all. He helpfully supplied several links (One of which no longer works) to support his rather aggressively put case. Fine, I don't mind being corrected on matters of fact, but I have now spent some time going over my references from a Public Administration degree course and find that there are a number of things in similar vein that Marx did say, though not quite as clearly as the "quotation" I posted.

There is a very good exposition on this and the possible origins of the "quotation" on The John Birch Society blog. I suggest it is worth a read, particularly as it makes some interesting points in regard to the present banking crisis and the origins of the drive to get banks to take on the so-called "toxic debts".

Capitalism isn't a perfect system, it never was and it probably never will be, but from what I have observed in former communist states I have visited and from what I can see happening around me in Socialist Britain, I can say that I prefer it to the centrally planned, centrally controlled and centrally allocated system that pertains in the so-called "workers paradise" of a communist or socialist state. One has only to look at the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Communist Planners who diverted the rivers feeding it to create an irrigation scheme to create agricultural land - land now poisoned by the salts irrigation has leeched from the soil - to see one of the evils this system brings. Desk wallahs sat in a remote Capital and dancing to the tune of the ignoramuses that make up the political profession these days are not and never will be the best people to decide how best to conserve, use or improve the natural order. As for their ability to produce a "fair" or "just" society, forget it.

Marx and his fellow "socialist" thinkers missed an important point as my lecturers were at pains to point out. Put simply, they worked from the premise that society was a "fixed" structure, that the "worker" would always be a "worker" and that "wealth" could not, in ordinary circumstances, trickle down to them without some direct intervention. Hence the socialist taste for "Tax and Spend", except that anyone with half a brain can tell you that some 60% of any "budget" to operate anything, is absorbed in wages, salaries and perks. And this is as true of any bureaucracy created by socialist ideologues as it is of anything else and, as the bureaucracy grows, it absorbs more and more of the "wealth" it is supposed to "redistribute". Marx failed to notice that the hardest workers soon reaped the reward and managed to rise above their fellows.

My principle objection to any and all forms of socialism is that, as a system, it promotes the mediocre, rewards the lazy and robs the hardworking of their just reward in order to pay for it. In addition, "Socialism" in all its guises, has been the root of every major conflict of the 20th Century and will undoubtedly be the cause of the collapse of Western Society in the end. As the post I referred to earlier points out, President Obama rode to power on the back of an organisation which campaigned for and got an Act which imposed on banks the requirement to lend money to sections of the American society who would not or were unlikely to be able, to pay them back. Now that it has caused a major crisis he and his supporters want to blame the banks for doing what the politicians demanded they do. That is typical of socialist politicians - the UK Labour Party is a prime example of it.

Socialism is, at the most basic level, about teaching people to regard anyone better off or harder working and better rewarded, with envy. It is about teaching us to covet one another's wealth, prosperity and well-being in order that those who orchestrate it can ensconce themselves in power and syphon off as much of our wealth as they can get away with for themselves while pretending to redistribute it more "fairly".

I have said it before and I'll repeat it here again: You cannot be Socialist and Christian. The very principle of regarding someone else's wealth or possessions as "unfair" breaks the 10th Commandment and its practice involves breaking the 9th. Perhaps that is why most Socialists in Britain and elsewhere are so vehemently anti-Christian.

Struggling at the moment to get my head around course design and course materials for a short course I have to give in Ireland next month. Its a bit like clutching at ephemera, just as you think you have it sorted someting else moves and you've lost the thread. Part of the problem is that this is for a mixed group - some fire officers, some consultants and some civil engineer/fire officers. Now you may think that should make it easy, but in fact it complicates things no end. For some I'll have to explain the concepts and for others some of the explanations will be too simplistic .....

As it's a "bespoke" course, the other challenge is to find support notes and materials which will give the content I have to deliver without having to write it all myself. All of this takes up an enormous amount of time - in fact it is often said that to prepare an hours lesson takes four hours of preparation. Well try the maths to work out how much time is absorbed by trying to put together 35 hours of tuition.

No wonder my head hurts. And I already know the "preparation" time isn't built into the fee .....

Sigh.