The Forgotten Words and the Choices We Made. Exploring the tension between the traditional narratives…
Rapist Allowed Into Britain.
Parents reading the horrific case of how a Slovakian rapist was allowed into Britain to sexually abuse two little girls will be sickened.
Quite fairly, they will ask, ‘Why on earth was he ever allowed in the country?’
Surely checks should be made on those trying to come to Britain before they arrive and molest our children, not once they have already carried out their vile crimes.
Quite simply, they and their daughters have been let down by the system.
( Daily Mirror, 13.08.2015 )
A rotten society is when the rich and the powerful use their influence to protect their own.
( Daily Mirror )
Before the election David Cameron was asked if he would cut child tax credit.
He looked David Dimbleby in the eye and said, “No”.
What a lie.
Just a few weeks later he announced £4.5billion cuts from tax credits.
( Yvette Cooper, 08.08.2015 )
To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the republic.
( Theodore Roosevelt )
They Have Monopolised Everything That Is Possible To Monopolise.
Poverty is not caused by men and women getting married.
It’s not caused by machinery.
It’s not caused by ‘over-production’.
It’s not caused by drink or laziness, and it’s not caused by ‘over-population’.
It’s caused by Private Monopoly.
That is the present system.
They have monopolised everything that it is possible to monopolise.
They have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth.
The only reason they have not monopolised the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it.
If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe.
( Robert Tressell )
Here is my simple economic plan.
Raise taxes on the 1%.
( Johnny Depp )
I don’t remember a single school shooting when I was a kid.
What I do remember is our teacher having us begin the day reciting the pledge of allegiance, reading from the bible and praying.
We also had the Ten Commandments on the wall.
Maybe getting rid of those things wasn’t such a good idea after all.
No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
( Charles de Gaulle, 1890-1970 )
We Are Led By Men Who Produce Nothing.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion..
When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing.
When you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours.
When you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you.
When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed.
( Ayn Rand )
Politics?
Poli, a Latin word meaning many.
And tics meaning blood-sucking creatures.
( Robin Williams, 1951-2014 )
As long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world.
( William Gladstone, 1809-1898, holding the Quran above his head )
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system.
For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
( Henry Ford, 1863-1947 )
If we cannot control billionaires power to buy elections, the people elected to office will be responsive to the needs of the rich and powerful, rather than the needs of everyone else.
( Bernie Sanders )
When you start reading a bit more, about the amount of money being spent on ridiculous shit while there are food banks and families in poverty, it just becomes a joke.
( Kevin Bridges )
One Of The Most Unequal Countries In The World.
The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
The basis of this astounding, and growing, inequality is largely based on the disproportionate nature of our education system.
Our school set-up is one based on segregation.
It is of rich separated from poor.
Of sharp-elbowed parents set apart from those who take what they’re given.
Of fake religious converts, and those who do believe, partitioned from those who can’t find a corrupt priest willing to sign a form, or who are not religious.
It is fuelled by rich, posh people who don’t want their kids to mix with ‘rough types’.
By people who think devotion to a faith elevates them above non-believers.
And by those who think their child is brighter than anyone else’s so should go to a ‘better’ school than everyone else.
‘Everyone else’, by the way, is usually working-class white, black and Asian children of all academic abilities, but few opportunities.
( Fiona Phillips, 21.06.2014 )
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
( H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956 )
Every man who is not helping to bring about a better state of affairs for the future is helping to perpetuate the present misery, and is therefore the enemy of his own children.
There is no such thing as being neutral.
We must either help or hinder.
Respect.
I was raised to treat people exactly how I would expect to be treated.
I was taught to say please and thank you.
I was taught to respect my elders, and say, ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’.
I was taught to say, ‘excuse me’, and to hold the door open for the person behind me.
I was taught to let another person have my seat if they needed it.
I was taught to knock before I open a door, and say hello when I entered a room.
I was taught to be kind and honest, and to help others if I could.
( Len Firswood )
Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society.
And any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
( Edmund Burke )
Tory Party Politicians Are Dim.
The Tory Party politicians are in fact as dim as you think they are, and there is no secret room containing smart people who actually know what they are doing.
They are whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow.
( Dominic Cummings, June 2014 )
Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilisation is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
( Pearl S. Buck, 1892-1973 )
The theories that drunkenness, laziness or inefficiency are the causes of poverty are so many devices invented and fostered by those who are selfishly interested in maintaining the present states of affairs, for the purpose of preventing us from discovering the real causes of our present condition.
All Media Are Harshly Censored And Punished.
I have visited China many times.
It is an exciting and energetic place.
But it is also an unpleasant, corrupt, cruel police state, in which people fear to speak their minds and opponents of the regime disappear.
All media are harshly censored and punished when they rebel.
The Communist Party, responsible for countless murders and one of the worst man-made famines in human history, still dominates the government, and its officials deal brutally with those who stand in their way.
( Peter Hitchens, 22.06.2014 )
Innocence and guilt can be bought and sold if you are part of the wealthy and powerful elite.
( Len Firswood )
Democracy is the means by which those who adore authority and crave security of servitude can use their superior numbers to enslave those who wish to be free.
The Grand Thieves Are Running The Country.
You are saying our problem is civil disobedience, but that is not our problem.
Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.
Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty.
Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.
That’s our problem.
( Howard Zinn, 1922-2010 )
A God or a Creator may exist, but religion is simply a tool invented by the powerful to control the weak-minded, the fearful, and the stupid.
( Rose Winfold )
One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.
( Thomas Sowell )
If a believer demands that you, as a non-believer, observe his beliefs.
He is not asking you for your respect, but for your submission.
America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
( Abraham Lincoln )
Impossible To Live Without Breaking Laws.
There’s no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws.
Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?
What’s there in that for anyone?
But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted, and you create a nation of law-breakers, and then you cash in on guilt.
( Ayn Rand )
What do you mean, I can’t force people to follow my religion?
Stop oppressing me!
The Fascists of the future will be called anti-Fascists.
( Winston Churchill )
Don’t confuse the truth with the opinion of the majority.
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
( Robert LeFevre, 1911-1986 )
The Appearance Of A Democracy.
The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping.
It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.
( Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963 )
Be warned.
The argument you use today to restrict the rights of others, will be used tomorrow to restrict your rights as well.
It’s perfectly okay to disagree with both the major political parties.
It’s called thinking for yourself.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
( Denis Diderot, 1713-1784 )
There is something quite obscene about pin-striped city slickers banding together to make sure that the fat cats in their midst get even fatter by sinking their greedy snouts as deeply as possible into the trough.
( Rose Winfold )
More Than A Thousand People Are Killed At Work Every Year.
How much is a young life worth?
A lad of 16, I’m talking about old enough to smoke, but not buy a pint.
And not too old to be taken to work by his mum, at a local engineering factory in Bury, Lancs, to begin a Government-approved apprenticeship.
But too young to die there, for God’s sake.
That was the fate of Cameron Minshull, fatally injured by a lathe with no safety guards.
He died on January 8, 2013, and only this week did his family get some justice.
Meagre justice it is, too.
Zaffar Hussain, the sole director of Huntley Mount Engineering, was given an eight-month jail sentence, reduced from 12 months, at Manchester crown court.
Supervisor Akbar Hussain, Zaffar’s son, failed to take reasonable care for the safety of lathe operations.
He was sentenced to four months imprisonment, suspended for 12 months.
He was also ordered to do 200 hours of community service and fined £3,000, to be paid in monthly instalments of £200.
Zaffar and Akbar Hussain had pleaded guilty to individual offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act.
At an earlier hearing, the firm had also pleaded guilty to corporate manslaughter, and was fined £150,000, payable in six instalments of £25,000.
Lime People Training Solutions, the training company that placed Cameron with Huntley Engineering, and now in liquidation, was fined £75,000 after being found guilty of failing to ensure the health and safety of a person not their employee.
Cameron’s case is just the tip of an ugly, largely forgotten iceberg.
Death at work is more common than you think.
Official figures from the Health and Safety Executives for the last available year 2014/15 say that 142 people were killed and 78,000 injured.
Construction, agriculture and manufacturing (especially food) are the most dangerous trades.
But these statistics are massively understated, say industry hazard experts.
Hilda Palmer, of Manchester-based Families Against Corporate Killers, says “More than a thousand people are killed at work every single year. In fact, over the last decade, five under-19s have been killed every year and 5,000 injured”.
The Tories wanted to abolish or privatise the Health and Safety Executive, but found they couldn’t.
So they slashed its budget by more than 35% and plan further cuts.
They reduced the number of workplace inspections, and reclassified hazardous industries like engineering as “low risk”.
David Cameron has even blamed a fall in work experience placements for young people on failure to “simplify” i.e. dilute health and safety rules.
That is the climate of danger into which young people like Cameron Minshull are being sent.
( Paul Routledge, 17.07.2015 )
Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.
( Aneurin Bevan )
It’s not a handout.
It’s not welfare.
It’s money from the government from a fund you have paid into.
For when times are hard.
And it belongs to you.
Reviving The Financial Parasite.
The great tragedy is that it should have been a final stop message for the global economy when the crash happened, but because the politicians have become so locked up in the belief that you can’t have a viable economy unless you have a large financial sector, they’ve spent their time reviving the financial parasite rather than reviving the economy that the parasite had actually brought to its knees.
( Steve Keen )
The majority work hard and live in poverty in order that the minority may live in luxury without working at all, and as the majority are mostly fools, they not only agree to pass their lives in incessant slavery and want, in order to pay this rent to those who own the country, but they say it is quite right that they should have to do so, and are very grateful to the little minority for allowing them to remain in the country at all.
( Robert Tressell )
In every country that Muslims are a minority, they are obsessed with minority rights.
In every country with a Muslim majority, there are no minority rights.
Women And Girls Have Been Abandoned.
No one is suffering under the doctrine of Islam more than Muslims are, particularly Muslim women.
Those who object to any attack upon the religion of Islam as racist or as a symptom of Islamophobia display a nauseating insensitivity to the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world.
At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, forced marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of multiculturalism and religious sensitivity.
This is a crime to which every apologist for Islam is now an accomplice.
( Sam Harris )
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
( Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister )
The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions.
In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.
( Adolf Hitler )
If we bring up religion, we will have differences, we will have arguments, we will never be able to get together.
But if we keep our religion at home, keep our religion in the closet, keep our religion between ourself and our God.
And when we come out here we have a fight that’s common to all of us, against an enemy who is common to all of us.
( Malcolm X )
I’m not an idiot.
I’m not stupid.
In fact, I’m quite intelligent.
And, I’m a nice person.
You’re just pissed off because I can see through all your bull-shit and lies.
( Rose Winfold )
Humans Are All One People.
Researchers have proven scientifically that humans are all one people.
The colour of our ancestor’s skin and ultimately my skin and your skin is a consequence of ultra-violet light, of latitude and climate.
Despite our recent sad conflicts here in the U.S., there really is no such thing, scientifically, as race.
We are one species.
Each of us is much more alike than we are different.
We all came from Africa.
We are all made of the same star dust.
We are all going to live and die on the same planet – a pale blue dot in the vastness of space.
We have to work together.
( Bill Nye )
What kind of nation are we when we give tax breaks to billionaires, but we can’t take care of the elderly and the children?
( Bernie Sanders )
It is intolerable and indecent for a society to produce by over-working and under-paying human beings.
( James Mitchell )
We, the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to over-throw the Constitution, but to over-throw men who pervert the Constitution.
( Abraham Lincoln )
Never let the influences of the modern world affect your morals or who you are.
( Rose Winfold )
They Don’t Like Women.
Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they?
They are all in favour of the unborn.
They will do anything for the unborn.
But once you are born, you are on your own.
Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months.
After that, they don’t want to know about you.
They don’t want to hear from you.
No nothing.
No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing.
If you are pre-born, you’re fine.
If you’re pre-school, you’re fucked.
Conservatives don’t give a shit about you until you reach ‘military age’.
Then they think you are just fine.
Just what they’ve been looking for.
Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.
Pro-life, pro-life.
These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors.
What kind of pro-life is that?
What, they’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it?
They’re not pro-life.
You know what they are?
They’re anti-woman.
Simple as it gets, anti-woman.
They don’t like them.
They don’t like women.
They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state.
( George Carlin )
People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance.
They live, they love, and they die.
And that matters.
That matters.
That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.
( Elizabeth Warren )
My mother had a kindness that embraced all life.
She knew her place well and was comfortable in giving everything she had.
This is the tradition of native women.
( Chief Dan George )
Jesus said: “Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth”, “Love not the world nor the things of the world”, “Woe unto you that are rich. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”.
Yet all these self-styled ‘Followers’ of Christ made the accumulation of money the principal business of their lives.
Could not agree more.