Clapped-out

Posted on April 20, 2020 by leslie

Alder Hey Memorial Tablet

Clapped-out

A.R. Kneen, on ‘our’ NHS 

Truth matters. So, too, does freedom, privacy, independence and human rights. But truth arguably matters above all of these. NHS workers, including doctors and nurses, work for money. They get paid to do a job. This should not be considered a controversial statement. Arguably, a proportion of NHS workers get over-paid relative to their ability and performance levels. And some do not provide a good service to patients.

In all fields of paid employment, we find people who do a good job, people who do not. For example, certain people think that all police are terrible. That is not true. Some police are bad, and the over-exercise, if not abuse of power by police officers has been recently demonstrated. However, most police officers do a fine job. Likewise, there are Catholics who believe that all priests are beneficent and do nothing but good for the people they serve. This is not actually true. A number of priests have molested children, and are evil. One could go through all forms of employment and find average performance, good performance, poor performance, and excellent performance. This is true of solicitors, builders, dentists, hairdressers, soldiers, teachers, scientists etc. It also pertains to those who work in the NHS. Continue reading →

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Labour, blasé about Britain

Posted on April 18, 2020 by leslie

The Coronation of Queen Victoria 1839, John Martin

Labour, blasé about Britain

Stephen Michael MacLean

No one is immune to coronavirus, not even royalty. Clarence House recently announced that Prince Charles had tested positive and was “self-isolating” in Scotland. Queen Elizabeth, meanwhile, was carrying out her official duties at Windsor Castle. As the royals follow the rest of British society in coping with the “new normal,” one is reminded of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s statement, after Buckingham Palace was damaged during the blitz in World War II. “Now we can look the East End in the face,” she said.

Such moments have endeared the monarchy to Britons. The Crown sits at the pinnacle of parliamentary democracy. Brexit support was energised by the same motivations: independence and self-government. These are conservative principles, and so it is not surprising that Tories were in the Brexit vanguard. Nor should it be forgotten that Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party kept the faith when many in the Conservative Party lost theirs.

Recent polling by YouGov confirms Brexit’s patriotic appeal. It also reveals just how out of sync with Brexit are the majority of Labour Party supporters: 48% are ashamed of the last 300 years of British history, compared to 29% who are proud. However, more than half of Britons in general, 53%, take pride in their British heritage. Continue reading →

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Covidiocy

Posted on April 17, 2020 by leslie

Mount Carmel Fire, Waco Siege

Covidiocy

Ilana Mercer on coronavirus conspiracy theories

Government is bad enough. There is no need to explain its workings using conjecture and fantasy. The facts about it suffice. In particular, imputing garden variety government evils to conspiracies is based on the following faulty premise: government generally does what is good for us. So, whenever we think it is failing in its mission, we should look beyond the facts for something sinister.

As if the state’s natural quest for expanded power were not enough to explain the events! Why, for example, would you need to search for the “real reason” behind an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless you honestly believed government would generally never prosecute such a war? History belies this delusion. Even when government prosecutes a just war, it finds ways to turn it into an unjust war by prolonging it. After all, a protracted crisis demands more taxpayer funds. Cui bono? Continue reading →

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Thoughts on the First Easter

Posted on April 17, 2020 by leslie

The Entombment of Christ, Caravaggio

Thoughts on the First Easter

    by David Ashton

Desperate times, desperate measures. A global “Act of God” has significantly impacted on “faith” communities. Churches everywhere are closed to worshippers and communicants, because of another oriental virus. The Pope at Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury recited the Lord’s Prayer alongside “millions around the world” – with what heavenly answers we are not told. Christians have gone into a catacomb of prudent self-isolation, like everyone else.

Could this be a punishment, like the ancient deluge, for human impiety? Or a sign, along with earthquakes, locusts, and rumours of war, of the Second Coming of Christ, a salutary surprise indeed for those who do not even believe in the First? If no minor miracles cure the lepers of this modern disease, is a major miracle on its way, at long last, to shut down the whole mess?

With more livelihoods threatened than lives, the Bishop of Chelmsford compared our isolated households to fourth century hermitages, hoping our cities would resemble those north African deserts, its occupants meditating on the walk of Jesus to the cross. “On Easter Day, a new reality was born. When this is over, may God spare us from ‘getting back to normal’. We await a resurrection.”[1] Sanctimonious pulpit patter aside, how precisely the ecclesiastical bureaucracy conceives “resurrection” surely directs enquiry into its Biblical source. Continue reading →

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Lockdown

Posted on April 14, 2020 by leslie

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fifth Plague of Egypt

Lockdown

AR Kneen asks some awkward questions

Freedom used to matter. People used to care about it. We used to say: ‘it’s a free country’. Debates on television mentioned ‘liberty’, ‘rights’, ‘civil liberties’, ‘privacy’, ‘independence’ and the like. But not now that the country is pretty much under house arrest. People are advised not leave their homes. Over-zealous policeman are stopping people allegedly out without good cause. All businesses not deemed ‘essential’ were told to close, making hundreds of thousands of people unemployed. Whereas, in the past, the closure of a plant resulting in the loss of several thousand jobs would be worthy of discussion, hardly a word is said now on behalf of hundreds of thousands of unpaid people. GP surgeries are closed. Operations, medical procedures and treatments have been cancelled. Churches, too, are shut down and sporting events, concerts and other gatherings are prohibited. Clubs, restaurants and pubs – all shut down. Schools are closed. Suddenly, the idea that children must be in school or their parents will have to answer to the state is set aside. Free assembly is banned. Human contact is severely curtailed. The new term ‘social-distancing’ is incessantly mentioned. This pertains to physical distance, which is prescribed at 2 metres.

Some individuals are so gripped by fear that they are unable to process information properly. People are informing on their neighbours, as often happens under totalitarian regimes. Indeed, the police have set up hotline websites to facilitate informing. The media stoke the spirit of fear. There is little rational discussion of facts, of alternatives – and nothing is put into context. There are suicides and women are reportedly being beaten behind closed doors. Continue reading →

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Kung Flu Fighting

Posted on April 12, 2020 by leslie

Kung Flu Fighting

Ilana Mercer lambasts killer bureaucrats

“Living and dying in Chinatown
Yes they’re living and dying in old Chinatown
In Chinatown, you better look around
Man, you don’t stand a chance if you go down in Chinatown”
Thin Lizzy

“When, Mr. President, will you deliver instant, standardized, country-wide testing to all the American people,” comes the daily, petulant demand from the malfunctioning media, reiterated by the expert class and an intelligentsia that is not always very intelligent.

The hype over testing will be the next contagion of illogic on matters related to coronavirus. The testy twits are treating COVID testing as though it were an amulet against the dreaded disease. It isn’t. All testing does is give an individual a snapshot in time of his COVID status. As soon as he drives out of the testing facility, a COVID-free person could become infected. Unless they engage in prevention, a single testing in time doesn’t in any way give individuals a clean bill of health. Prevention protects people.

Testing is, however—at this stage of spread—helpful in giving medical researchers a grip on the symptomless-sick phenomenon, as well as an idea of how the disease is disseminated and distributed in the population. Test and keep testing large enough representative samples, and you’ll get good prevalence data. You’ll probably discover statistically significant differences in COVID infection rates along the rural/metropolitan axis, and the Chinese/no-Chinese axis. In fact, high-tech meccas are likely a good proxy for the correlation between COVID and the Chinese population. Hubs of high-tech like my state of Washington—the King and Snohomish counties, in particular—have high coronavirus infection rates. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, April 2020

Posted on April 8, 2020 by leslie

Sounds Original, South Ealing Road, W5

Endnotes, April 2020

Stuart Millson, on the forgotten pleasure of browsing for records

With the near demise of the record shop (our older readers may remember the much-loved Farringdon Records at Cheapside or Harold Moores in the West End), it is the high street charity shop that has now become the unofficial forum for those classical-music-loving refugees who dislike the current vogue for “downloads” or ordering online. Many such establishments now seem to contain at least one row of classical CDs – some even offering a section devoted to vinyl. On a recent visit, prior to the Coronavirus onslaught, to an extremely well-stocked Oxfam in Tonbridge, I discovered a substantial collection of CDs – Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, EMI, Decca – recordings which seemed to be in near mint condition; the casing and packaging indicating that their former owner had curated his or her collection with extreme love and care.

Decca box-sets of Benjamin Britten folk-songs; Boult and Handley in Elgar for EMI lined the shelf – then leading the ranks, in their famous, distinctive yellow livery of Deutsche Grammophon: Karajan’s final recording – Bruckner’s monumental, yet radiant Seventh Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic; Carlo Maria Giulini’s intense, substantial, finely-paced Brahms Symphony No. 2, again from Vienna; Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic in Mahler’s heaven-storming ‘Symphony of a Thousand’; Ivo Pogorelich, the much-admired, Belgrade-born piano genius – and still a young artist on his 1990 recording of Chopin’s Op.28 Preludes. The prelude No. 15 in D flat major, the celebrated ‘Raindrop Prelude’, is given perhaps its most gorgeous interpretation on record, each touch of the Steinway evoking slow-moving raindrops on the windows of Chopin’s Mallorcan mountain fastness. Continue reading →

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Honour thy Father

Posted on April 7, 2020 by leslie

Generalgouverneur Dr. Frank

Honour thy Father

“I met one man who was wounded in love,
 I met another man who was wounded with hatred”
Bob Dylan

What our Fathers Did: a Nazi Legacy, Wildgaze Films, BBC Storyville & BFI, 2015, directed by David Evans, reviewed by Leslie Jones 

Introduction
“This” film, so we are informed, “is the story of a relationship” between three people, namely Niklas Frank, Horst von Wächter and Philippe Sands. Of these three individuals, Sands seems the most composed. An eminent international lawyer specialising in matters pertaining to genocide and crimes against humanity, he lost many of his relatives in the Holocaust. Niklas, a former journalist, is the son of Hans Frank, who was Hitler’s lawyer and head of the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland. Horst is the son of Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter, Governor of the Kraków District, from October 1939 to January 1942 and subsequently Governor of Galicia, from January 1942 to 1944. A lawyer and sometime Austrian rowing champion, Otto von Wächter was a Gruppenführer in the SS, having joined the Nazi Party early on, in 1930.

Horst von Wächter
The fourth of six children, he was born in 1939, and named after Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel. He lives in the Schloss Hagenberg in Austria, a sprawling edifice dedicated to the god of numbers. Sands met Wächter for the first time there and was understandably apprehensive about the visit. His host showed him numerous photographs of members of his family, including one of his father, standing alongside Himmler. In another of Horst’s photos, we see him as a small boy, while staying with the Frank family in Der Schoberhof, their summerhouse in Bavaria. Niklas Frank, also born in 1939, appears in the photo. Continue reading →

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The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Part III

Posted on April 4, 2020 by leslie

Raphael, St Paul Preaching in Athens

THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE ROMANS, PART III [i]

By Darrell Sutton

In the study of ancient Christian texts students are obliged to investigate wider settings such as social and cultural histories and imperial policies. The text of Romans fascinates classicists and New Testament scholars because of its acknowledgement of an established community of Jews in Rome during the first century AD and of a smaller society of Christians within it. In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul does not address the contours of Roman religion, restricting himself to elucidating his own notions of messianic fulfillment of Jewish anti-types. In these epistolary depictions, Christ is the initiator of his own “ruler-cult”, whose devotees obtained legal freedom from the power of sin through their trust in the ruler’s death, resurrection and ascension above the sublunar sphere and into the faraway heavens (chapters 1-5).

In the below chapters (6-8), Paul summarizes this liberty in Christ. He provides a picture of sin’s intrinsic development in human beings and its disablement by means of Jesus’ crucifixion, a portrayal that is unrivalled by, and unknown to, previous Graeco-Roman writers who attempted to enlighten readers about native predispositions and ethical ideas. Greek myth being what it was, rendered the Greek mind of that day incapable of envisioning man as Paul did later. Previously, Aristotle pondered how a person could do what he or she knows to be wrong (Nic. Eth. VII 1-11). But his conclusion that ‘a person does not act in ways that oppose what one deems to be noblest, and so people do not ever err’, was not exact or helpful. Overrun by passions, people act and react against their better judgment daily. Paul takes a different tack in his discussion on the jurisprudences of the law of sin and the law of the spirit of life. In fact, from his deductions of Old Testament passages – while leaving aside Greek philosophical speculations – Paul was able to construct the kind of meticulous arguments about inbred sin and its effects that no other intellectual or rabbi of his day could have composed. Continue reading →

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Battered and Bruised

Posted on March 31, 2020 by leslie

Grimsby trawlers making ready for sea

Battered and Bruised

Bill Hartley, on beholding Grimsby

The House of Fraser store in Grimsby is set to close. For anyone who thinks that a department store represents retailing at its best, the place is a depressing sight. Large areas of floor space stand empty; elsewhere the remaining racks of clothes offer 20% off the existing sale price. Forlorn staff, soon to lose their jobs, show minimal interest in the few shoppers who pick over the remnants.

House of Fraser is situated in a bright and cheerful mall, a once positive attempt to modernise shopping in the town. Grimsby is an old seaport with very little in the townscape which is attractive, apart from the Minster church of St. Mary and St. James. Not far away is the Humber, a brown and muddy river which drains much of Yorkshire. There used to be a ferry across but no-one wrote a song about it.

Visiting Grimsby brings a sense of being at the end of the line. The town lies fifty miles up the road to no-where, in flat countryside next to that unlovely river and is a byword for social problems. Those with long memories may recall when this was the largest fishing port in the world, an industry brought down by the Cod War and the Common Fisheries Policy. Continue reading →

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