blem clearly and concisely:
* Government is spending far too much of our income* Much of what it spends is wasted* It raises the money in a damaging way.
Without major cuts in government spending, from 45% of GDP to nearer 30% and a big increase in government efficiency the UK economy will continue to decline compared with other countries, especially those outside the EU. This would require a fundemental change in attitude by politicians and an acceptance by the electorate that government does less and that they do more for themselves.
I don't think this will happen and conclude that the UK will stay on track to becoming the Greece of the 2020s."
... UNLESS of course the Government introduces a considerably increased level of inter-departmental "mind-set" innovation of the kind that Roger Bootle describes in his conclusion to the article -
"Not so long ago, the leading members of this Government were completely unprepared for the fiscal cataclysm that lay ahead. The OBR’s pessimistic assessment raises the possibility of the future fiscal position catching them unawares from the opposite direction.
Making a real difference to the economy by budgetary measures requires a vision of the future tax system and the patience and foresight to make progress towards that vision in stages.
Otherwise it is easy to squander billions by giving out sweeties here and there to little or no effect. The time to start thinking about that vision – and turning it into reality – is now."
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l analysis & appraisal, I said that there were obviously two directly opposed categories of criticism - constructive & destructive - to which he replied never ever apologise for offering constructive criticism - while all those around you perceive ALL criticism to be destructive.Reality is not just the bad; it is also the good.
The mind requires an awareness of both in order to work at its best.
For one who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends,
but for one who has failed to do so, his/her very mind will be the greatest enemy.
- as Carl Jung so rightly stated -
THE most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
When one considers the actions of our "masters of the globe" - I invariably amuse
myself by thinking about Leonardo da Vinci's take on them, which was that they were -
"as wise as the wind they fart from their arses"
…
ciousness, culture, and the end product, emergent complexity. Some of these are inductive scales that cannot be measured in numeric units. We might measure information, as bits for instance, but we cannot enumerate the ingenuity embedded in the code. We don’t have a consciousness meter that we can put on your head. And beyond the crude measure of energy-density-flow, we don’t have a scale for emergent complexity. It is a triumph in intellectual history that we have come to understand the scales of time, size, matter, and the varieties energetics. These are reliably real and profoundly practical insights about how our universe and our economy function.
All phenomena, all academic disciplines, and all economic activity can be located in reference to these hierarchical scales. It is this great matrix of bottom-up and top-down causality that allows complexity to grow.
Humans are not at the top of the scales of size and time, but somewhere in the middle. On the energetics, information-ingenuity, sentience-consciousness, and emergent complexity scales, however, humans are off the chart. The human niche is particularly favored in the matrix for the time being—each of us a nexus of causal relationships (physical, biological, social, economic, psychological, mental), realizing extraordinary flows of energy and ingenuity, intensities of subjective experience, and accelerating transformations in the modern period.
In our drive toward specialization and division of labors, we rarely reflect on these natural hierarchies and what they might mean for our understanding of science, self, and society. “The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship,” writes Harvard biologists E.O. Wilson in his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.[14]
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of the physical manifestation of our planet of THINGS, for both of the principles of YIN and YANG, in ABSOLUTE BALANCE & HARMONY, must be present to BUILD and to MANIFEST in our third-dimensional reality, as well as our fourth dimensional higher conscious understanding thereof, from without.
…
e people for the benefit of a few of the people.
Having switched over to digital broadcasting, however, at least the TV Licence payer had the choice, in respect of the River Pageant, to turn to SKY NEWS' excellent coverage of the event from early morning onwards.
Out of 562 comments to date - Ed Vaughan's comment sums up my feelings ABSOLUTELY -"Mark Thompson, you mark my word, is the cat's whiskers and anything and everything BUT running a media corporation. He was adamant that the BBC coverage was really superb. He's quite happy to receive in excess of £800k but would always draw a comparison with USA media corps.
The reality IS - what does he actually do minute by minute during the day?
Being human he has to visit the lavatory so that time would cost a few thousand pounds each year; washing his hands, combing his hair, blowing his nose and yes drinking his morning coffee. I bet he's never costed these things out.
His predecessor gained fame when he arrived at the BBC (Greg Dyke) his first words to staff were - "we can cut the crap" so as I said the lavatory is an important feature."
PLAN your work - WORK your plan - in terms of the BBC, increasingly appears to be based on -
"HOW can we spend our share of the TV Licence levy with as little cost as possible - so that
we the planners can continue to live in the manner to which we have become accustomed."
CUT THE CRAP INDEED
…
analysis & appraisal, I said that there were obviously two directly opposed categories of criticism - constructive & destructive - to which he replied never ever apologise for offering constructive criticism - while all those around you perceive ALL criticism to be destructive.Reality is not just the bad; it is also the good.
The mind requires an awareness of both in order to work at its best.
For one who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends, but for one who has failed to do so, his/her very mind will be the greatest enemy and as Carl Jung so rightly stated -
THE most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
When one considers the actions of our "masters of the globe" ...
I invariably amuse myself by thinking about Leonardo da Vinci's
take on them, which was that they were -
"as wise as the wind they fart from their arses"
…
upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods."
Whipping Boy was an established position at the English court during the Tudor and Stuart monarchies of the 15th and 16th centuries. This may not have been quite as bad as it sounds. The whipping boys weren't hapless street urchins living a life of torment, but high-born companions to the royal princes. They were educated with the princes and shared many of the privileges of royalty. The downside was that, if the prince did wrong, the whipping boy was punished. It was considered a form of punishment to the prince that someone he cared about was made to suffer.
In the context of the signing of Magna Carta in 1215 however, and the beheading for treason of King Charles I on January 30, 1649; the strangeness of the concept of a whipping boy is a little easier to understand when put into further context. The Divine Right of Kings was the belief that legitimate kings were appointed by God and so were answerable to God alone, in juxtaposition to the ever legitimate concept of GOD HAVING NO RELIGION.THE Universal Law of Gender IS the expression of YIN & YANG, otherwise termed the feminine/solar and masculine/lunar. The law states that these two principles reside WITHIN ALL THINGS, and IT IS through these principles that HUMANITY is ABLE to CREATE.THE Universal Law of Gender is the CREATIVE FORCE that runs from the inner into the outer world. IT IS the force of the ONE & ONLY GOD. It creates LIFE, even that which is born into the solidity of the physical manifestation of our planet of THINGS, for both of the principles of YIN and YANG, in ABSOLUTE BALANCE & HARMONY, must be present to BUILD and to MANIFEST in our multi-dimensional reality, as well.…
of authentic life-affirming experience. Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel — they talk about economic growth at all costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis, and other planetary-scale crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.
Those with a spiritual bend might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream. They are like Mr. Anderson and his peers in The Matrix movies, plugged into a cultural system that feeds on their bodies and souls while keeping them unaware that they are living in a dream world.
What if the pain so many of us feel is caused by the same cultural sickness? How might we diagnose it? What are its root causes? And most importantly — how do we heal ourselves and the world around us?
This culture tells us that humans are selfish and greedy. It says that we are nothing more than individual islands of ego floating in a sea of chaos. It is the Great Myth of Separation that takes many forms. We’ve seen it as humans apart from nature, reason divided against emotion, body separate from mind, one tribe distinct from another. This mental tendency to categorize the world according to its separations is the root cause of illness in the world today.
And it has a name. It’s name is Wetiko.
Joe Brewer
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Added by Michael Grove at 10:32 on November 27, 2021