Addicted to other people’s money

Gordon Brown, the discredited former Chancellor of the Exchequer to Tony Brown’s regime, has followed in his old master’s footsteps by trying to ‘heal the scar that is Africa’.

His method for doing that is the same one that he tried in office: at a time when the UK is closing essential services to limit the damage caused by debt racked up under Brown’s fiscal regime, he suggests borrowing more money – to give to the third world.  This sounds very much like the ‘Aid tax’ that Brown was conspiring with the increasingly stridant Oxfam to help deliver its Marxist vision of  ’redistribution’.

The former UK prime minister wants to create a “global fund for education” to raise the £13bn per year needed to bring lessons to the poorest children.

There are 68 million children in the world missing out on primary education.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16705691

Quite apart from the fact that no-one is listening to Gordon Brown anymore, if he had really been that interested in Education, Education, Education he may have done more about it when in office.  Under Labour education flatlined leaving one in five children functionally illiterate, and in some of the worst areas in the country, such as the North East and the Isle of Wight, one in four children cannot read or write.

The shame of ruining the economy while achieving nothing has not shaken Brown’s world view one jot.  Despite being raised by a wealthy family and enjoying the best education money can buy, he remains addicted to the idea that money does not rightly belong to the people that earn it – it should belong only to people like him – who know how to spend it wisely.

 

 

Asking for it – Catholic bishop blames children for sex abuse

The Bishop of Tenerife has followed the Catholic Church’s official line on its culture of using children for sex, by blaming everyone except the priests involved.

Bishop of Tenerife: “There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it”

In a Christmas Eve interview with La Opinión de Tenerife, Bishop Alverez said:

Q: It’s necessary to give sexual guidance?

A: We cannot leave people free to turn out however they turn out.  Why don’t we do the same with violence or other impulses that people have?  Moreover, only six percent of homosexuals owe their condition to biological issues.  We shouldn’t confuse homosexuality with the existential necessity of a person, with what is practiced as a vice.  The person practices it like one might practice the abuse of minors.  He does it because he is attracted by the novelty, a distinct form of sexuality.

Q: The difference between a homosexual relation and an act of abuse is clear.

A: Of course, but why is an abuser of minors sick?

Q: To begin with, the abuse is a relationship that is not consented to.

A: There might be minors who consent to it, and in fact, there are.  There are adolescents of thirteen years of age who are minors and are totally in agreement and furthermore desire it.  Even if you take care they provoke you.  This aspect of sexuality is somewhat more complex than it appears.

Full text here

While in the new puritanism that we seem to suffer from, there is complete denial about the sexuality of children, the bishop’s view is not an enlightened one.  Children do have a sexuality and want to explore that – often inappropriately with each other and with adults. But the sexuality of children is like the rest of their personality – unformed and immature.  It is not there for adults to exploit.

Children are immature and for all sorts of legal purposes are not allowed to give consent (i.e. we don’t let them take out loans or gamble).  The bishop appears to be in denial of what most people would hold to be self-evident – that a priest is in a position of trust and that even if a child has a crush on a priest or actively seeks out sexual contact with him,  if sexual activity takes place, it is the priest’s fault. Period.  No mitigation.

He of all people should understand the importance of not falling into temptation.

Why do people continue to give money to Big Issue sellers?

Before you hand over money to a Big Issue seller, think about this…

How come if you are a single mother on benefits and do a bit of bar work to pay for Christmas you are a ‘scrounger’, but if you live in a hostel, receive benefits and then top that up by earning £100 a week selling Big Issue, you’re a hero and do-gooders will come up to you and give you a fiver and a large cappuccino?

The recent story in the press about the Big Issue seller claiming £25,000 in benefits while living in a £130,000 house is a timely reminder…

As a Romanian immigrant living in the UK, Big Issue seller Firuta Vasile already qualified for more than £25,500 a year in benefits.

But one state handout she wasn’t entitled to was housing benefit. Until now.

Yesterday the 27-year-old mother of four was celebrating having won the extra payout – worth at least £2,600 a year – after her local council was over-ruled by a judge.

Miss Vasile, whose marital status is unknown, said the benefits money would help her pay rent on her £130,000 three-bedroomed home, while she continues to earn around £100 a week selling copies of the homelessness magazine.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087857/Romanian-Big-Issue-seller-given-legal-right-claim-housing-benefit.html#ixzz1jvyhuvME

 

Even the Big Issue admits that most of its sellers aren’t actually homeless, they are living in hostels or other supported accommodation while claiming benefits .  It admits that most need the money for drink or drugs, and in the run-up to Christmas advised not to give substantial sums of money to sellers (other than buying a magazine), for fear they would have enough money to kills themselves with drink/drugs.

So unless it is to make living on the streets as a drunk or junkie a viable lifestyle… what is the Big Issue for?

 

Opus Diaboli 3.0 – the 2011 Walpurgisnacht Greeting

It does not matter how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get up.
— Vince Lombardi, football coach

The Walpurgishnacht greeting, didn’t get posted this April as, while struggling to manage some trying life commitments and hold down a high-pressure job, the Opus Diaboli site was hacked and corrupted with malware.

It has taken until now to unpick the threads and put the site and this blog back together, but it seems, alas, that around two year’ worth of posts has been lost.  This was a hard blow, especially after version 2.0 of the website was lost to a hard-disk failure.

Meanwhile, the world has moved on…

The wheels having fallen off Communism in the last two decades, we are now witnessing the death of socialism, as Greece, Italy, France and other countries who have thought for decades that they could  defy gravity, are having to face up to the reality that every Dollar or Euro that is borrowed, is a Dollar or Euro that has to be earned in the future.  And paid back.

England stopped its insane romance with New Labour and we are beginning to see just how Brown’s catastrophic judgements nearly brought the country to bankruptcy alongside the likes of Greece.

The world population clock has ticked over the 7 Billion mark.

Now at Yule, Opus Diaboli is back, and the website will soon be operational again.  Many of the issues which first brought  Opus Diaboli into being five years ago seem even more prescient.

This is going to be an interesting year.

Julian Karswell

Health campaign wants all to suffer to protect the stupid

One of the problems of a state owned health service is that the state thinks that it owns your health.

The Balance North East campaign this week launched a campaign to turn the clock back when alcohol was so expensive that wine was something that only the middle-classes aspired to enjoy.

Balance director Colin Shevills said: “Our region is drinking too much from an early age driven by alcohol which is too affordable, too available and too heavily promoted.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15997695

Balance, which was set up under the old Labour regime, reflects that administration’s  belief that people don’t have any business making decisions for themselves, and they should be prevented from making harmful choices rather than being allowed to suffer their consequences… the example that they give of the kind of person they want to protect is Joanne Patterson, 41, from Sunderland, who was….

 diagnosed with cirrhosis and chronic liver disease two years ago. She had been drinking three bottles of wine, as well as lager, every day.

She now has to take 90 to 100 tablets a week and had spent 300 days in hospital in the past two years.

She said: “What’s to say it’s not going to happen to anyone else, because I never thought I would get this much damage from drinking.

“But I have done and it’s irreversible damage and I have to take tablets for the rest of my life. My liver could fail at any time.”

Certainly there are serious problems with children and drink in the North East and there should be some education around these issues, but you do have to wonder what kind of education could get through to someone so stupid that they don’t realise that drinking three bottles of wine a day and topping it off with lager is  going to do you serious damage?  The way you felt in the morning would be some indication…. However, Balance’s solution is to make Alcoholic drink more expensive (which was a popular theme in the old administration).  All this is likely to do is increase the number of illegal stills that are growing up and push people like Joanne on to heroin instead of alcohol.  And anyway, in other countries where alcohol is cheap,  their children are not killing themselves with lager, so why in the North East of England?

Educationally, the whole North East region  is either below national average or well below national average and truancy is also high.

The one thing which could stop the North East having such terrible problems with its young people is if it gets over the idea that the ship building and manufacturing jobs lost to the far east in the 1970s are  ever going to come back to that region.  For generations parents in the North East have been raising children in the belief that the government will supply subsidised manual and semi-skilled jobs for them.  This has not happened in nearly 30 years and it is time that these parents put aside the socialist fantasies of full employment for the unskilled and realise that in today’s job market, it’s education that matters. If parents make sure their children go to school and learn something while they are there, then maybe children will have a real incentive not to destroy their lives with alcohol.