Our festival of lights
I’m talking about Bonfire Night and adjacent celebrations and, when saying ‘our’, am speaking as a Brit. Guy Fawkes Night was one of the highlights of my childhood, as much for the associated food as for the meagre number of fireworks our dad could (or would) buy.* In this country at least, November the 5th marks the beginning of winter Read more…
Money or “Who says I’m better off?”
(a beginner’s guide to why you’re not rich) I woke up this morning thinking about money and what it is. I don’t know why but I seemed to be coming out of a dream phase. Anyway I was thinking about inflation – how a pound is now worth about 10p compared to fifty years ago. On the other hand, my Read more…
“I believe in being tolerant …”
The 16 November was the UN’s International Day for Tolerance. Sounds highly desirable but then I think it also sounds arrogant. It’s like that old tag-line for the 1960s – ‘the Permissive Society’. Who has the right to tolerate or permit another’s existence or behaviour? According to my dictionary, tolerate comes from the Latin word ‘tollere’, meaning to lift up. Read more…
Taxation and off-shore money +
Taxation and off-shore money The so-called ‘Paradise Papers’ have made this front page news but it’s nothing new. Up to 30 years ago my main mode of long-distance travel was by hitch-hiking and it’s common knowledge that this situation tends to make people a lot more open in what they say than they would otherwise be. So, over that time, Read more…
For God, King and Country
This obscenity is found on war memorials, often in Latin: ‘Pro Deo, Rege et Patria’. I call it an obscenity because the majority of those servicemen and women did not die for those fictions but either because they had no choice in the matter or to save their comrades. Lying on the battlefied with his legs blown off, a soldier Read more…
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other lies
On the 16th November 1917, Lenin is reported as stating at the Congress of Peasant Assemblies (Soviets) that anyone who attacked the soviets was a counter-revolutionary. He wasn’t lying, he was a counter-revolutionary and it only took 2 years until, under Trotsky’s direction, the Bolsheviks took over all the soviets, put the army and navy under the command of officers, Read more…
The women as usual …
This title is part of a quote from an account in a local newspaper of the Exeter Bread Riot of 1854, it goes on, ’The women as usual were the beginning of the disturbance.’ (Western Times, 14th January 1854) I love that because it reveals a truth that, as managers of the domestic economy, generally, women are the ones who Read more…
Inferior Practice or ‘Why pick on Trotsky?’
You probably won’t have spotted the bad pun in the title but it’s relevant – there’s theory and there’s practice (or praxis, if you’re a pedant). Leon Trotsky was outstanding at the first and, many would claim, just as great at the second but I’d object that there was a grave mismatch. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to involve a Read more…
Education makes you stupid ..
.. that’s its job. I’m not the first to make this observation but it probably confuses most people. ‘Surely,’ they think, ‘education makes you smart or makes smart people smarter ..’ That’s the sales pitch it comes with but the truth is more complicated. The simple answer is: it depends on who is providing it and who it’s designed for. Read more…
And all that jazz
Jazz was the dominant music of the 20th century and looks like keeping that status in the current one. Jazz was the classical music of the 20th century. Jazz is a generic word for ‘music of black origin’, as the designers of the MOBO award came to describe it. Jazz is talking dirty, jiving, rapping. Jazz is music for the Read more…
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