A sensible tax and benefit system is one in which people are always substantially better off working more, moving to a higher-paying job or being awarded a pay rise.
, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?”
This wasn’t Churchill’s finest oratorical effort, but it was clever. As well as denouncing the forces of darkness and the enormity of their aggression, it was an invitation to ordinary Britons, suffering the horrors of war at home, to reflect on the challenge ahead. He was, in effect, asking fellow citizens: “Of what are we made?”
Seven decades later, one wonders how the great man would view the kind of people the British have become. What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which he urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.
For evidence of our self-inflicted abasement, look no further than this month’s ruling from Europe’s Court of Human Rights that Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist preacher, regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s main inspirational leaders in Europe, cannot be deported from Britain to his native Jordan because his trial there might have contained evidence obtained by torture.
According to a recent government report, some 3,775 former foreign prisoners, who were in line for deportation by the UK Border Agency, have been released from custody and are living here, most thanks to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a family and private life. A Nigerian rapist was due to be sent home after losing a series of appeals in British courts over his jailing for an attack on a 13-year-old girl. But Strasbourg’s worthies insisted that they must protect the culprit’s “social ties” with Britain, which had blossomed while he defied expulsion.
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of spontaneity, namely, acting in accordance with the actual situation, backed by all my expertise, but within the here and now. Therefore my actions are never rigid, not following any stiff dogmas established in the past; instead my actions rather grow afresh within the situation they they arose from. Therefore Wuwei does not represent an ideology, but the wise and not predetermined spontaneous action which is part of the great whole, adapted to the course of nature from where its decisions evolve. Or even better: spontaneous action depicts acting out the nature of things. The same goes for one's personal nature as well. Knowing about my nature, perceiving it and being able to understand my inner voice in a clear and lucid way means that decisions are no longer determined by results. What remains IS merely to flow side by side with our own naturalness. The only thing required is just to follow, following being the only thing that happens. Determinations do not have to be taken until a relationship with one's own nature no longer exists, namely, when the inner voice can be perceived. Then I do have to determine an action out of a certain argument. In this way, however, my intuition would most likely result in a random hit. Wuwei however turns it into an extremely reliable source.
Within a deep level of meditation 'non-acting' literally means the way of reaching the spiritual experience of emptiness.
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Added by Michael Grove at 10:46 on December 24, 2012
lly parasitic as a Flu virus. For sure, we need old-fashioned banks who help us move money around, and take care of our savings. Possibly we need insurance companies to help us deal with life’s risks. Maybe there is even some sense in having companies which manage investments – if that process can be removed from the paper-casino it currently lives in and revert to supporting companies to buy plant and equipment, or cover their trading cycles. But a City of London filled with financial institutions generating huge fantasy debts which we, our children and our grandchildren are supposed to pay back? They’re not worth the paper they’re NOT written on.
BUT - WHAT IF Nassim Taleb's "Black Swans" were engineered by a group of men -
living together in society today - as a result of information asymmetry ?
" When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society - they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it "
Frederik Bostiak
Governments should be afraid of their PEOPLES -
and the PEOPLE should not be afraid of voting into
power - GOVERNMENTS
- of the PEOPLE
- by the PEOPLE
- for the PEOPLE
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mes less than six months after Boeing
was temporarily forced to ground the new plane, amid concerns over the safety of its batteries.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it is in contact with Boeing.
"We are aware of the situation and we are in contact with Boeing as they assess the incident,"
an FAA spokeswoman said.
In a second incident, Thomson Airways says one of its Dreamliner planes travelling from
England to the US had to turn back after experiencing a technical issue.
Howard Wheeldon, an aerospace analyst at Wheeldon Strategic Advisory, told the Telegraph
he thought the problem was unlikely to be down to the Dreamliner’s battery, noting that
aircrafts smoke “for all sorts of reasons” and it could well be down to a “small issue”.
However, he said an issue with the battery, or any other technical problem with the
Dreamliner model, would shake shareholders’ faith in Boeing.
(what about the faith of the 787 flying public !!!???)
“It’s serious – it’s another little chip away in confidence in the company’s ability to solve a
problem. If it is a battery issue, there will be an erosion confidence in the company.
The investors would take a pretty dim view [of its handling of the matter],” he said.
The US company has invested more than $20bn (£12.8bn) in the 787, which made its debut
in late 2011 after a three-year delay. Its ground-breaking design and materials sought to
create a more fuel-efficient plane.
Boeing said in February that it remained confident in the 787 and had more than
800 outstanding orders for the jet, including from Virgin Atlantic and British Airways.
SO THAT's ALRIGHT THEN - who are these people !!!???
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f
Milan. One day Leonardo sat down and inscribed the top of a sheet
of paper using his idiosyncratic right-to-left mirror writing with the
words, “On the 2nd day of April 1489”, adding later... “Book entitled On the Human Figure”. As a new exhibition of his
anatomical studies at the Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of
Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh suggests, though, it would be another
two decades before he really hit his stride.
It is only a year, of course, since Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist,
a magnificent exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace
that showcased the full breadth of around 200 sheets of
anatomical studies by Leonardo in the Royal Collection.
Inevitably, the new exhibition, also curated by Martin Clayton,
feels less significant. While it sets Anatomical Manuscript A in
context by providing a handful of representative sheets from earlier
and later in Leonardo’s career, including one of the famous 1489
drawings of a sectioned skull, it does not offer a comprehensive
overview of his activities as an anatomist.
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actions within one's local community. It is only then that the computers and
even books will really begin to nourish us in a way that is more benevolent than it is destructive.
Oral cultures are necessarily storytelling cultures, which are inevitably place-based cultures -
because the stories that thrive and live in this valley will be very different from the ones being told
on the other side of this mountain range. Rejuvenating the primacy of the sensuous world -
renewing our solidarity with the more-than-human locale - is only going to happen by
rejuvenating oral culture. Face to face storytelling, and all the things that go with it. Rituals,
community festivals, collective and good-hearted initiations of the young men by the older
men, and of the young women by the elder women, community celebrations honouring the
seasonal changes.
David Abram during an interview with Derrick Jensen entitled ... Alliance for Wild Ethics || The Perceptual Implications of GAIA
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e
performance that gives the word “visceral” new meaning.
Such a response to the way Snowden released batches of NSA documents to Glenn Greenwald,
filmmaker Laura Poitras, and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman calls for explanation.
Here's mine: the NSA’s goal in creating a global surveillance state was either utopian or dystopian
(depending on your point of view), but in either case, breathtakingly totalistic. Its top officials meant
to sweep up every electronic or online way one human being can communicate with others, and to
develop the capability to surveil and track every inhabitant of the planet. From German Chancellor
Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to peasants with cell phones in the
backlands of Afghanistan (not to speak of American citizens anywhere), no one was to be off the
hook. Conceptually, there would be no exceptions. AND the remarkable thing is how close the agency came to achieving this.
Noam Chomsky
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