The Unorthodox Website Blog

The former Socialist countries, and the existing ones, are often criticized for their restrictions on individual freedom, but surely the pendulum in our own society has swung too far the other way?

Individual freedom is fine so long as it doesn’t interfere with the freedom and wellbeing of others. When it does, the community comes first.

There are a number of areas where I feel a good dose of old-fashioned Socialist discipline might work wonders:

• The obligation of everybody of working age, and able to work, to do so.
• The obligation of citizens to show gratitude and loyalty to the society which educated and raised them.
• The obligation of all young people to offer service to society, and learn respect for their elders.
• The encouragement of all citizens to become actively involved in running and improving society

These four points, though not necessarily exhaustive, summarize what I feel is needed, or would be needed, in a Socialist Britain or a new Socialist federation of countries with Britain as a member state.

I attended the CND preview of this new documentary film at the Prince Charles Cinema near Leicester Square this afternoon, followed by some Questions and Answers.

Having been active in CND and the peace movement since 1961, I found this history of  it and where it is going in the future very interesting. It also put the case strongly for nuclear disarmament and against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly focusing on the use of depleted uranium and the terrible effects on civilians in several countries.

If I have one minor criticism it is that the early days of CND were rather skimmed over after the first Aldermaston March in 1958. This first March was in fact organized by the Direct Action Committee, not CND itself which had just been formed and the CND symbol unveiled for the first time, representing the semaphore letters N.D. for nuclear disarmament.

I received a questionnaire and an appeal today from the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, a volunteer organization. As always with health care appeals for this country I did not respond, and for very good reasons.

While I’m sure the St John’s volunteers do their best, they are not trained paramedics. I do NOT want me or my friends/relatives to have to rely on well-meaning but unprofessional volunteers running an ambulance service should they suddenly fall ill or have an accident.

Are we to have unpaid, poorly trained volunteers augmenting the police and fire services? Surely we want properly trained professionals in all these emergency services?

St John’s are best occupied providing first aid at big public events, and calling the NHS if an ambulance is needed.

This brings us to funding. By donating to organizations like the St John’s to provide an ambulance service to back-up the NHS ambulance service, by donating for hospital scanners and other equipment, or to research cures for cancer, HIV/AIDS, etc not only are these donations a drop in the ocean, but they do more harm than good in my opinion.

Paraphrasing that great comedienne, the late Hylda Baker, with her phrase about her sidekick: ’she knows, you know’. I’m talking about Spirit, whether it be male, female or of no assigned gender.

I’ve had so many communications where Spirit (or Spirits) have made it plain they are aware of what’s going on, sometimes telling me things I didn’t even know myself.

Some examples: my grandmother came thru via medium Colin Fry and told me not only how she died and her first name, but gave explicit details about the botched refurbishment to my mother’s kitchen which had just taken place, even referring to my standing a hot pan on the new working surface, burning a hole in it and then covering up the damage. She even said exactly where this was – on the left as you walked into the kitchen.

The so-called British ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ is in the news once again because Nick Clegg has raised the folly of replacement of the Trident nuclear missile submarine system at a cost of over four billion pounds a year for the next 25 years.

Let’s leave aside the moral arguments for a moment, and look at the credibility of this so-called ‘deterrent’.

Many military men agree that Trident is totally useless, and if we look at the past 65 years since nuclear weapons were developed we surely have to agree. Nuclear states have been attacked, they have engaged in wars abroad and lost some of them. Britain had the Suez fiasco, America Vietnam, the Soviets had to pull out of Afghanistan. Britain had its Falklands colony reclaimed by Argentina, America had 9/11, Britain had 7/7.

I attended a lecture yesterday on whether the genes in a person’s make-up were a deciding factor in whether or not that person grew up to be gay, lesbian or heterosexual. The lecturer was very pedantic in insisting studies proved it was all down to genes, and that upbringing and experiences in childhood had little or no influence.

This is, in my view, not only a sweeping generalization, I don’t believe it is true, and it also seems that the conclusions were reached before the figures and studies were even looked at. It seemed to me that they decided on a politically correct outcome, and this was that people are born gay or straight and have no choice in the matter (just as people are born black or white) but they also made sure to add the proviso that this did not mean Nazis or prejudiced people could weed out the gay gene.

Ban The Bomb for Evermore!

I was going to vote for the Green Party candidate in the General Election because they are committed to nuclear disarmament, but of course under our unfair electoral system in my Labour marginal this would just help let the Tory candidate in. Nevertheless I was prepared to vote Green as I never vote tactically, which perpetuates an unfair system in which only the two major parties, Labour and Conservative, ever get elected to government. It is a form of blackmail on the electorate: vote for us even though you don’t like us or you’ll get something even worse. You can’t afford to vote for the party and policies which reflect your views because we’ve made the system so unfair, your vote will be wasted and let in the worst possible candidate of all.

I have problems identifying with teenagers, or even understanding a word they say nowadays. Not just the current slang, but everyone under 40 seems to gabble their sentences, speaking far too quickly and indistinctly. For this reason I have to have the subtitles on the TV when anybody under about 40 is speaking, or I can’t understand what they are saying. Anyone over 40 I can understand perfectly, every word.

Perhaps this is partly because I was never a teenager, not really. Of course I went thru my teens, but I hardly knew a single teenager thruout my teens. The trouble was I was hospitalized a lot as a child for various operations, and four in 1958, two of which were very traumatic. This was when I was 12 and just turned 13.

As a result I retreated into a shell for the rest of my college life, hardly speaking to anyone.

Cardinal Bertone has blamed gays for the pedophile scandals involving Catholic priests, and denied that church’s rule of celibacy is the culprit. It is a fallacy that gays are more likely than heterosexuals to abuse children, in fact the opposite is true. Most child abuse is of girls by male adults either in the family or close friends of the family.

As regards the Catholic Church, the celibacy rule which extends far beyond a ban on marriage for priests to a ban on any form of sexual outlet whatsoever, even masturbation, is the root cause of this child abuse. The scandal is that the priests guilty of this offense have so often been protected by the Church, and even allowed to commit the same offenses again in a different region, instead of being immediately dismissed and brought before the courts.

This may seem a silly question, and of course it depends on what you understand by ‘God’. However now I’ve gotten your attention, what we are really talking about is a disembodied consciousness or conscious energy field which organizes sub-atomic particles in order to create matter. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Creator who is all-knowing and who planned everything in advance; it certainly doesn’t mean a Super-being with a long white beard sitting on a cloud in the sky. It is much more likely to be a constantly evolving and expanding conscious energy field, of which all living things are a part.

In actual fact it would seem that consciousness not only organizes but creates the sub-atomic particles out of waves of energy, also called by quantum physicists ‘waves of probability’.

Quantum physics has proved that sub-atomic particles turn into these waves of probability when not being observed.