Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, If you think - as I do - that the news is so often of a severe nature that it can perhaps be quite unsettling, then you have my sympathy. However, the passing of a renowned boxer (Muhammed Ali a.k.a. Cassius Clay) seems to have attracted a highly disproportionate amount of attention. Having lived through the same era as he, and a keen follower of sport, I would be one of the first to applaud his very unique contribution His poetical licence, creating phrases such as "I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee" are possibly as memorable as anything Shakespeare produced. But his stand on civil rights and Vietnam considerably stand out and almost surpass his feats in the boxing ring. And in the boxing ring his style itself was often sheer poetry in what is, nevertheless, a brutal sport. But, to devote so much 'air' space to his demise on the news channels, when (for example) children are being killed and maimed in huge numbers around the world, do...

Dear Reader, Way back in the 1960s, I used to do a lot of hiking - hitch-hiking mostly - on the continent of Europe, mainly in France and Italy. There are many tales I could tell from those days concerning my great experiences, but the one that is relevant to this article - and which sticks out as much as the others in my memory - is the impact of returning home to Blighty (the UK) after one of those trips abroad. When getting back to Dover the first thing I would do is get a train heading to London, but I immediately felt the impact of the sheer ordinariness of Britain's transport infrastructure compared to that on 'the continent'. Over there, trains were not always smart but they were interesting; over here they were very staid - designed by engineers (and accountants too, probably). But the main variance was that the continental trains ran well, and on time.  The people, too, were more colourful, and expressed warmth and generosity that - to be honest - I'd n...

Dear Reader, My apologies ... an emergency or two has occurred this week-end, so no post until May 28th, I'm afraid!

Dear Reader, Last week's article - about U-turns - brought me to thinking about the state of affairs on Climate Change, especially in view of the fact that the UK has a major target to achieve by 2050. The thought can easily be "is the UK really serious about the subject, or is it just talking?". Well, surprisingly enough, the UK has made it a legal commitment to be responsible in this matter in the Climate Change Act, 2008. One clause states: "It is the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that the net UK carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 80% lower than the 1990 baseline." The UK had in fact (according to reports) accomplished 30% against the 1990 baseline by 2015, so it does appear that there is not a lot of shilly-shallying that the government can do, and some progress has been made (it would appear). The rules are laid out in stone. But the recent Paris Convention was a call to all major nations to take the matter seriously: the UK (...

Dear Reader, Well, there is clearly now a world of flux: our UK government is back-tracking on a number of its policies, the media's expectation of Donald Trump losing his way seems now not to be well grounded, and the supporters of Brexit may well have lost sight of the fact that the London Stock Exchange seems about to become under German control. To add to all that, we now have a Muslim who is Mayor of London, representing the Labour Party and again showing that the Media's anti-Corbyn agitations really do not work, forcing them to switch instead to highlight that Labour did not do well in Scotland. The fact they've not been doing well there for a few years since the SNP machine took hold appears to be neither here nor there as far as the Media is concerned. Who pays these Media people? Anyhow, while the spotlight this week has been on the various local elections (of dubious importance) the Tories have backtracked and u-turned in so many areas it's almost i...

Dear Reader, In the previous article I wrote: I saw the commonality of the essential message in all [spiritual] teachings, And then (some 18 years ago) something caused me to observe that, after all, the teachings of Jesus made sense: they fitted in to the teachings described elsewhere; that there was a common direction in which all people are going.  All paths do, indeed, lead to the One God!  ... The real issue  (as the old seers said) is to  Know Thyself . That can really only come from daily practice, with the Love of God  and  the Love of Thy Neighbour, as the central themes, as well as spiritual study. It has also been said by a being far, far better and greater than me: Religions are many but the goal is one; Jewels are many but gold is one; Stars are many but the sky is one; Cows are many but milk is one; Beings are many but breath is one; Nations are many but earth is one; Flowers are many but worship is one. That is, Unity out of Multi...

Dear Reader, My usual article reflects on some aspect of the world's problems, and their causes. But to me the root cause is that within our own individual selves. After all, what is a society except a collection of individuals, and if their collective behaviour is not "civilised" then the root cause to that might be found in the character of each individual of that society, particularly in its leaders. Sheakespeare, in Measure for Measure , illicits this sentiment: Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves;  for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. Whether we like it or not, a higher morality of some form must be brought to our attention for us to live in brightness, not darkness, otherwise we become in danger of becoming animal-like. The beauty is that many in these past few decades have rejected religion yet then go out and form their own 'way' which in itself becomes a reli...

Dear Reader, My apologies for no article last week: an insect took a severe dislike to my foot and managed to put me out of action for a few days! There so many matters of concern to address, but I'm initially focusing this week on the environment, a matter over which many people ( at least 908 ) have been killed over the last decade, says  this site.  That website also says that 913 journalists have been killed over the same period - in many locations, world-wide. The expression of free-thinking is being repressed in a big way, but evil will never win over truth. Of that I am confident. If those figures are not alarming enough, the Guardian   states "air pollution led to more than 5.5 million premature deaths in 2013". Not hundreds, but millions , of people. All this is in the context of the world's governments permanently trying to push on for economic growth, ignoring the possibility of (a) that growth can be seen to be causing an undue amount of har...

Dear Reader, There is sunshine that transcends all the worst stories that continue to emanate from around the globe, but while that spiritual sunshine sustains the faithful one increasing worry is that the physical sunshine is often weak. At least in the United States and increasingly so in Europe. Before I elaborate on that matter, let me take us back to the 1980s and one President Ronald Reagan, and, indeed, his friend on this side of the Atlantic, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was during that age that emphasis on both sides of The Pond began to be put on specialist 'Think Tanks' to come to conclusions about the state of the world and how to deal with the various problems that existed. We are now living through many of the repercussions of the advices of those Think Tanks, one of them being the development of the financial market as a more important industry to the extent that it has dominated (and nearly destroyed) the world's economy. The time since th...

Dear Reader, The rights of man have been discussed at length by many worthies over several centuries, but I will select one whose impact was in the last decades of the 18th century, one Dr. Joseph Priestley. I choose him as I know him somewhat better than others as a polymath of considerable influence at the time, and who for awhile lived and operated in Birmingham, my home town. He even influenced some of America's well-known names, such as Thomas Jefferson, before and after Priestley himself settled in America to live out his last years. Priestley's fundamental maxim of politics was the need to limit state interference on individual liberty. Yes, his were different times, but the principles of government have, surely, not changed very much in the time since. However, we are lately witness to disturbing efforts in our own fair country to take away a fundamental right of the disabled, which is their right to at least a reasonable level of subsistence support from the St...