Grombles

Like most first world inhabitants, I use planes more than buses. Actually I never use buses. I use elephants more than buses. But that's not the point of this post. I have probably flown at least once every other month for the past forty years. Say around 500 flights somewhere and back. And on every flight, two things always happen: The captain invites me to enjoy the flight - or hoped I enjoyed it I didn't I loathe flying. First there's the airport. It's a shopping mall preceded by long queues where I'm instructed to take off my belt and shoes to check if they can blow up. Them I'm frisked in case I'm an Islamic terrorist and once again likely to blow up. Once through, I'm assaulted by over-priced shops in which there's nothing I ever want to buy. Gone are the days when you didn't pay duty in airports (unless you are leaving the EU, in which case your booze is cheaper than in the UK, but not as cheap as where you're going). So to avoid...

Did you hear Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 this morning ? Damien Hirst was chatting about his life and the music that inspired him. To be honest I only caught 10 minutes of the show, but it was enough to realise that I knew nothing about his world. Although my home is littered with modern art, none of the art itself is by a 'name' - at least as a far as I am aware. Perhaps when me and the Mrs have shuffled off our mortal coils (what is a 'mortal coil'?) and our kids put our stuff up on ebay, someone somewhere will shriek "it's a Bill Plonkworthy... a genuine Bill Plonkworthy!" and bid a fortune for it along with the 500,000 other twitter followers of said Bill P. Well I've never heard of the Bill Ps that Damien and his fawning interviewer fondly and respectfully name-checked throughout my 10 minutes of casual attention, so I can't claim I was enthralled by the programme, nor did I want to catch the 20 minutes I missed (his choice of music was...

Regular readers will be under no allusions that I don't favour putting blind faith in stories percolating through the minds of ancient bearded-ones. They brainwashed children and terrified poorly educated adults who were never encouraged to ask:- 'is this likely?' If you're reading this, you're probably already an atheist - otherwise why search for writings about it when atheism simply means 'no faith in fairy-tales'. It's a non-subject... unless you happen to be imprisoned in some barking mad regime like Saudi for failing to chant some meaningless bollocks from a holy book with enough conviction to fool the faith police. What sort of god has to  force people into believing 'his word' and then punishes them if they question it? So much for omnipotent and merciful.   And if faith makes so much sense, why issue laws to prevent people from worshipping someone else's nonsense? Surely if your brand of faith is right and it works for you, it is a n...

Have you noticed that the poorer a country, the more likely it is to be fanatical about religion (except the USA of course - but I bet you can correlate religiosity against educational achievement and therefore poverty there too). The government of Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries and inevitably therefore a religious stronghold, has arrested 3 atheist bloggers from a list of 84 provided to them by a bunch of islamic 'informers'. Quite apart from the legitimacy of these whistle-blowers to determine who should be arrested and who not, even if you believe in supercomputers in the sky watching and controlling every Higgs Boson (etc) in the universe rather than trusting there is a scientific answer for everything (whether we yet comprehend it or not), you have to agree that freedom of thought beats brainwashing - especially when imposed by the state. If there really is a deity, then assuming it/he/she (!) is simply not a control-freak having Olympian fun at o...

I got an email from Ed Miliband in reply to one I sent him about a job creating idea as an alternative to their impractical Mansion Tax. See  Entrepreneur's Credits . Buried within his bleat about 'fairness' and all the other popularist mantra about 'millionaires' needing their arses kicked, was a paragraph revealing how little they'd actually thought through their Mansion Tax promise: "We recognise that it is important that any mansion tax should be designed to overcome issues affecting those who may be capital rich but income poor. There are many ways in which this could be done, such as deferring the charge for some people, and our Treasury team is consulting on the best way to do this. We will ensure that the details are right so people would not be thrown out of their homes." "Deferring the charge"? So if you can't afford to pay the tax from income (that's a fine of £20,000 every year for owning a £2m house), when you sell...

I have a son who went to a well known preparatory school (7-13) in Surrey. He came home one day clutching a leaflet for fun activity holidays that the school promoted every summer. The Titus Trust operate several camps around the UK where they organise fun outdoor activities for youngsters. Something caught my eye in the leaflet hidden in a paragraph in one of the sections describing the holidays. They used the word Christian. It was the only place in the whole leaflet that the word was used. My suspicions raised, I hunted around the leaflet for more clues and found the imprint which said something like 'A Titus Trust Charity' (the name of the camps was on the title of the leaflet). I dug deeper and found some disturbing evidence of who was behind these 'fun' camps. This is what I wrote at the time to the headmaster: Dear Headmaster XXXX came home the other day extremely excited about an outward bound camp next summer that he and his friends had been told about by a r...

It keeps rearing its head. Tax the rich! Make them pay their 'fair share'. It's the rich that got us into this mess. And all those other 'make them pay' soundbites designed to grab votes from our ever more squeezed population. The net effect is that wealthy people are pouring money into the Conservative party to help them fight off the scary wealth taxing parties. But all wealthy people aren't the same. What's important is not what they have, but what they spend their money on. And what the UK badly needs is for the people who know how to create jobs and wealth, to do more of it. I've written previously about why mansion or wealth taxes are both impractical and counter-productive in terms of helping the economy to recover. They are also unlikely to reap vast rewards for the treasury, but popular soundbites put left-wing parties into power. It's not about whether it actually makes money for the country, it's about whether it's popular and s...