Quote of the week

From Leg-iron.

Dai the Cameroid has called for the expenses fiddlers to be prosecuted. He must realise that some of those fiddlers are in his party so this is a brave move. However, he has dumped a few already so it'll hit the Gorgon harder than it'll hit him. Now, Dai, let's talk manifesto promises and referendums. Should those who renege on election promises be wrapped in slowly-tightening chicken wire until they are no more than pink chips? You've made some promises already so think about this one for a moment.

Yey!

Pink chips!

Obersturmbannführer Nutkin

Three things I know to be eternally true and proper guides to seeking the good life:

1. It does not make her bum look fat.

2. Someone’s already tried to break it – whatever it may be.

3. There’s no peace of mind or rest for the soul to be found in any sentence that contains the word accordion.

There's also a fourth, and though I may be starting to sound like someone with a manifesto here it’s still worth noting:

4. By their death wishes shall ye know them.

Look at these passages about squirrel culling.

They are bigger, stronger and carry a pox that is deadly to their smaller cousins.

Their raids on bird tables have made them a public enemy to some, but the grey squirrel's apparently relentless conquest of Britain may now be over.

Naturalists and landowners are joining forces today in a drive to effectively wipe out the grey squirrel from northern Scotland. It is believed to be the largest cull of a mammal yet seen in the UK, with many tens of thousands of grey squirrels expected to be trapped and killed under the government-sponsored project and shot on sight, legally, by landowners.

Facts from the Telegraph: natural history advisers to the Postman Pat franchise. A cull of at least 20,000 grey squirrels has led to red squirrels making a comeback in many areas of the country, conservationists have said.

Large-scale trapping and shooting of greys began at the start of last year. Most has been carried out in the north of England, the last main bastion of red squirrels south of the Scottish border.

The cull has been criticised by groups like the RSPCA, but those behind it say that their controversial methods are working and that sightings of red squirrels are now increasing. The claim comes as conservationists are planning to create two further "havens" for reds, on the Isles of Scilly and near Ullapool in the western Highlands of Scotland

Last week, it emerged that red squirrel numbers on the island of Anglesey, North Wales, had doubled after a pioneering project which saw the removal of more than 7,000 greys. Many conservationists believe controlling the population of greys is the only way to save the red.

The Government-funded Red Squirrel Protection Partnership (RSPP) says it has killed more than 18,000 greys since January 2007, chiefly in Northumberland. At least 2,000 more have been killed in Cumbria over the same period, while "unofficial" culls are thought to have taken the total number killed far higher.

This is how the Scottish Wildlife Trust describes this process on its website.

Our project aims for the next three years are to:

protect existing red squirrel populations in the Highlands, Argyll, North-East Scotland and northern Tayside

improve and share our knowledge and understanding of squirrel management

increase the involvement of private foresters and woodland owners in conservation efforts for red squirrels

increase our knowledge of the distribution of squirrels in Scotland and maintain a process for recording and disseminating this information

promote the project to the public

The red squirrel needs as much help as possible if it is to survive in Scotland for the future. The amount of funding available to save the squirrel will be a deciding factor on what the project can achieve. Our activities will buy more time for our red friend as we try to ensure red squirrels are part of Scotland's future. Donate NOW and help save red squirrels!

Hoots mon. Talk about the banality of evil. Ein Skwirrel. Ein High Road. Ein Furrier.

And there’s even a heart-warming and cheerful Jamie Oliver moment for all those foodies out there from the Guardian.

A pest controller on a mission to rid the UK of grey squirrels is moving south - to feed the demand for squirrel pie.

Paul Parker, 45, has helped catch and kill more than 22,000 grey squirrels in the past 18 months.

Parker, from Newcastle, said: "We are hoping to move down south. We have asked landowners down there if they need any help to get rid of the greys, to educate them as to our methods and how we catch them, using spring loaded box traps and catch live traps."

"I cannot personally get enough of these grey squirrels, people are eating them. If I was getting a hundred, they would take a hundred each and every day, the demand is so high. They are sold as soon as they hit the counter," he added.

"They are going to top restaurants, butchers, the working man. They are a delicacy and they are really hard to get - especially up this neck of the woods."

For decades the greys, imported from the US by landowners in the 1870s, have slowly spread across the UK, out-muscling red squirrels in their search for food. Already suffering from a loss of their favoured woodlands, red squirrel numbers have plummeted.

Parker said: "Red squirrels are such a beautiful, mystical little creature. The greys are not. They are destructive because they don't belong here; there is no place for them."

Yum, yum!

Now look.

I’m a vegetarian solely because Mrs. Northwester is concerned about animal welfare herself and she never even once as much as hinted she might want me to stop eating meat and you don’t let that kind of respect go unthanked. I personally have no problems with other people hunting or raising animals to kill and eat. And it’s also true that many people perceive the grey squirrel to be a pest that’s extinguishing the ‘native’ red squirrel, and I have no problems with killing pests on the one hand and conserving wildlife on the other. Go for it.

It’s just… Well, given how often and in how many different ways and places our enemies are trying and succeeding to mess up the world, I think it may be worthwhile to see what’s going on here. It’s the small details that can sometimes give us the key to victory, such as the discovery of the smallpox vaccine.

There’s so much to choose from.

First: Class

Here’s the Guardian and a State-sponsored, i.e., government-run ‘nature’ organisation involved in the mass killing of small furry animals. 20,000 dead and counting. They are being shot and trapped by individuals, and on behalf of a quango, that the Guardian approves of.

Would anyone like to guess what the Guardian piece would be like if the hapless greys were being hunted from horseback in southern England, to the merry sounds of the gentry enjoying themselves? Hmm?

Still and all, how about aristocratic landowners and cash-strapped farmers getting Peers and Japanese businessmen in to hunt or trap the Grey Peril. Instant approval from the bien-pensants from Islington to the Scottish Parliament, from Fylingdales to Faslane?

I also like to speculate what its reaction to any purely private effort on behalf of commercial farmers to cull badgers to protect livestock from bovine TB might be, Liberalverse-wide…

And I love this;

They are going to top restaurants, butchers, the working man.

The cultural Left doesn’t object to ‘top restaurants’ any more because they are the core of the political class and so they can afford them, but now that most beloved of the Left’s species designated as groups of special scientific interest - the working man - gets a seat at the table and so we must approve. If the horny-handed sons of labour can tuck into Tufty with impunity then only a boor or a bigot could object.

Second: Race.

Scots and Geordies; WWF-protected Northern mammals up to their armpits in the blood of formerly squeaky fluffballs are portrayed as official Heroes Of Environmental Production, and as such it’s all well and good, but I can’t help but wonder if – you know – the traditional squirrel hunters of some other country were being interviewed and portrayed by the cultural Left there might be mention of indiscriminate fire-power, a certain type of religion, perhaps: and the effects of the squirrel-hunters’ attitude on prospects for World Peace.

Played for laughs, there’d be banjos for sure.

Oh, and this:

They are bigger, stronger and carry a pox that is deadly to their smaller cousins.

You can just hear String of Pearls and In the Mood in the background there can’t you?

Third: Mysticism.

“Parker said: "Red squirrels are such a beautiful, mystical little creature. The greys are not….they don't belong here; there is no place for them.”

You know, as a soppy tree-hugger myself I’ve got to admit to awed admiration for this fellow’s chutzpah.

Red squirrels are mystical?

Okay, so there was Ratatosk who ran up and down the Norse World Tree conveying insults between the eagle at the top and the entropic dragon at the roots. And as an alternative cosmic image to the Big Bang, the Little Bang, the Expanding Universe (let alone any unseemly messing around with turtles or eggs) I’ve long felt that the arrival of a breathless squirrel at the eyrie and gasping out the words of Níðhöggr to the effect of ‘Your mother!’ was at least a colourful metaphor.

Perhaps Parker has a throwing-axe collection, a squirrel-skin coat, and maybe even a nice shiny helmet.

Red squirrels are mystical?

Is Parker a Jedi and thus can see a kernel of the Force in Nutkin’s huge supply of midichlorians? And if greys don’t belong here and there’s no place for them, do they thus truly have to die? Or just, like, go back to Roswell or the Mother Ship or something? The Guardian doesn’t seem to care.

Now, if I was interviewed by the Guardian and I suggested that native British animals were A) beautiful, B) mystical, and C) that the ‘non-native’ ones didn’t belong here, I expect that the Guardian would find it necessary to mention my politics and views on immigration and at the very least refer to my flaxen hair and crazed blue eyes. But the liberal paper of choice seems to relish all this death here. Paul Parker seems to have the key to the liberal killing-with-conscience-cupboard almost as if he has super powers or something.Paul Parker...

Paul Parker? Say, you don’t think…?

Fourth: official dishonesty.

Our activities will buy more time for our red friend as we try to ensure red squirrels are part of Scotland's future. Donate NOW and help save red squirrels!

Translation into English from modern charity-speak; ‘Please send more cash as we need to kill more damn Yankee greys, but we’re just too White Heather Club to mention the killing bit.

You don’t need to know anyway.

You can’t handle the truth.

What is truth?’

Fifth: Darwinianism.

They are bigger, stronger and carry a pox that is deadly to their smaller cousins.

The claim comes as conservationists are planning to create two further "havens" for reds.

"Red squirrels are such a beautiful, mystical little creature. The greys are not. They are destructive because they don't belong here; there is no place for them."

Hey, what happened to the Survival Of The Fittest? To Natural Selection?

The Guardian is Britain’s lead singer in the choir of the First Church of Darwin. So what happened to the argument that goes: since Nature terminates so many pregnancies anyway, what’s all the hoo-har about the NHS doing what comes naturally too?

And if the Reds can’t compete in the wild against the grey, why not just let the Great Mother do her stuff and send Rocky where the dodos went?

I can understand conserving something scarce and endangered on the grounds of its beauty and to preserve bio-diversity - or to put it in an old-fashioned way to respect God’s creation - and also because you never know when Scrat’s DNA might be needed to cure AIDS of to halt Global Warming or something.

But who gets to give the order Bring me the head of Patterwig?

I guess you have to join the special club to learn the secret code to the power of choosing life and death.

The liberal Left’s taste in death differs from the social Right’s.

Boy, does it ever.

The Left favours the deaths of Israeli farmers and wedding-guests and anonymous children (because they never see the light of day); whereas the Right nominates those who deliberately bomb civilians as their target of choice, Afghan ‘wedding-guests’ or those who kill or otherwise deliberately hurt children for the Reaper’s services. We’re funny that way.

To be fair to the Left, they’re very keen on avenging the deaths at Israeli hands of Palestinian children – but only the ones killed by Israeli ordnance – they go all vague about the ones given delivery rounds that don’t involve pizza or newspapers. I suppose it’s considered fair payback to the Right for merely expressing grief once or twice per column or post for IDF-made children’s’ deaths when we point out that these Palestinian children have a tendency to cluster around mortar positions, rocket-launchers, and to mingle voluntarily with armed 'militants'. Good thing we get the blame for that, I suppose.)

So what’s the purpose in pointing these squirrely things out? Well, in the culture wars I have been taught that it’s vital to keep the score between the social left and the cultural Right. ‘Only compare’, as the great Theodore Dalrymple says. Think of it as intel combined with esprit de corps to make a weapon.

Thanatological preferences are a good guide to where conservatives differ from liberals.

Picture from American Israeli Patriot.

Chain mail limbo dancing

Just a quickie to depress you further and to hammer your just prejudices deeper in.

A colleague of mine read a customer's letter out to us last week.
This customer had been trying to persuade a benefits decision-maker to give him more money to live on. He complained that he only got such-and-such for Jobseeker's Allowance (the routine welfare payment for those fit young men too gormless to persuade some dippy doctor that they have panic attacks, agoraphobia, or Depression), and so much Housing Benefit to help pay the rent.
He didn't mention his Council Tax Benefit but then folk on Income Support or income-based Jobseeker's Allowance have their entire bills paid for them by the local authority and after a few years on the dole they forget - if they ever knew - that they have any Council Tax liability at all. 'I don't pay Council Tax' shall be the whole of the law. The Poll Tax rioters should be spinning in their graves.

So anyway he wrote; clearly and politely in prose that could have been that of a suburban housewife describing the high cost of living, that what with one thing and another he just couldn't afford to make ends meet, and so he hoped that the decision-makers could see their way to upping the payments made to him. Then came the clinching and final very matter-of-fact sentence which I paraphrase here only slightly.
'If you don't pay me more I shall have to shop-lift or steal money to manage, and I'll get even more fines and then how will I manage?'

Do you see what he did there?
He went straight from expressing in some detail his dissatisfaction with the Welfare State through to his sole conceivable option of breaking the law and violating the property rights of others, and then straight on to anticipating with self-centred regret how the consequences of his crimes would impact his own comfort and convenience.

It's my contention that the underclass are a kind of aristocracy.
The purity and blamelessness of their pain and their insoluble and eternal helplessness absolve them from all moral responsibility and especially the duty to ever, ever exert themselves for their own support other than by insisting that the tax base and the tax collectors do so.

We may well deserve it for taking the Half Crown ourselves, but welfare advisers in the bloated bureaucracy are on the receiving end of daily abuse and why-me whiny self-pity as people complain that their benefits have been stopped because they failed to 'sign on' and how do we expect them to manage?

I love that one.
I fantasize about saying, perhaps the day after I see the Lottery jackpot clearing in my bank account (or failing that the day after a Conservative government announces that there will be no more 'hardship loans' and interim Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit payments based on 'nil incomes' for people who neglect to do the one simple, easy thing that they are expected to do to feed and house themselves, which is to attend the Job Centre for half an hour once a fortnight) that I never heard of them before today and therefore that I have no personal plans, opinions, or ambitions regarding their future managing behaviour and prospects.
No, strike that 'behaviour'. They don't connect their behaviour with outcomes in their lives at all, (' It's not my fault - the Job Centre messed up') except for their ability to browbeat or wheedle some bureaucrat to simplify and indeed to perform the task of supplying and filling in a new claim form and suggesting wordings whereby a decision-maker might change their mind and allow benefit payment back to the start of the sanction.

The other one I like is when someone - usually young and single and childless and gormless complains that they've rented a flat and that it turns out to cost twice the maximum amount of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit that they are entitled to due to their age and state of health. How do I expect them to be able to afford to live?
What were their expectations, I wonder, when they signed the lease?

The underclass are an aristocracy: an aristocracy of weakness and failure.
They aren't subject to the same laws as we are and they are absolved lifelong from personal responsibility for their subsistence, breeding, housing, clothing, and entertainment. They are surrounded by brow-beaten and servile lackeys who seek to extort from some distant and unseen peasantry (that'll be you, dear reader), the means of their subsistence and pleasure.
And the threat is there - always there - of violence: violence to the lackeys or, failing that, to anyone who insists that they pay their fines, attend interviews, return overpayments from fraudulent claims, or to reply to correspondence.

The Normans: ruthless and murderous looters though they were, at least got around to building great cathedrals and endowing monasteries and universities. I suspect it'll be a long time before the country feels any lasting benefit from this aristocracy from importing Chinese-made trainers, Burberry caps and plasma-screen televisions. Forever, possibly.

This lad could only think of theft to support himself in the absence of more generous welfare payments, and so I wondered who set the bar in life so low for him?
Who persuaded or taught or showed him that if 'they' didn't support him, he'd have to start shoving burgers or vodka or iPods into his tracksuit pants to make ends meet?
It was someone who met him long before us advisers and the other lackeys.

So - apart from me - cui bono?

Perhaps they and he might get together and come up with better ideas of how he might support himself in the future. They might do it best if they went off on some outdoor pursuits event together, to provide themselves with lots of healthy fresh air, inspiring countryside and the bracing exercise that comes with taking part in extreme sports.






Might I suggest wireless bungee jumping?

Velocirapor attacks: latest news

Dependability is nice.

In fact, one of the greatest virtues of living in a lawful civil society is that we can plan our lives with some level of confidence because we know pretty much how the people around us will behave in ordinary circumstances. I like the way that the neighbours will say ‘hello’ or ignore me rather than attacking me with machetes; and how my employers expect work from me in return for the wages they’ll pay me next month; and also how the police always furnish me with a brand new crime report number every single time my car is vandalized. And so on

This goes for the pacifist Left, too.

How well I remember the 1980s when the Soviet Union (then the biggest military power on Earth and the darling of about half of the Labour Party) was rearming mightily and at the same time promoting the world ‘peace campaign’ to secure whatever small portion of the world’s peace supply its huge expansion of conventional and nuclear weapons had failed to catch.

The Left - bless them - spent much of that decade arguing against Western rearmament in order to retain rough parity with the Soviets on a number of grounds; not least of which was that rearming might alarm the Soviet military into a pre-emptive nuclear attack on us because they’d grow afraid that we intended to attack them.

Apparently, Western generals and air forces weren’t expected to suffer similar alarm from watching the Soviets doing that self-same thing.

Another argument was that the building of more nuclear weapons worldwide would increase the probability of terrorists or rogue regimes (such as religious madmen or the world’s dwindling supplies of the crazed and egotistical dictators of unstable regimes) acquiring and using some of them. So the West should refrain from increasing the thievable nuke supply and also lead by example and hopefully the Soviets would be reassured and follow suit.

Strangely the terrorists and crazed dictators who the Left semi-privately expected (and publicly proclaimed they believed) most likely to press the button were such jackbooted loons who’d murdered and dictated their way to the top of Third World hell-holes using polling stations as President Reagan (who was known to believe in God and was therefore clinically insane) and Margaret Thatcher. Even the hated South Africans and Israelis usually got a free pass in those days because the Left had bigger fish to fry.

They didn’t include the Soviet premier on their Evil Nuclear Dictator list, for some reason.

CND and the Peace Movement were right of course about one thing; that any nuclear rearmament by the West was certain to lead to a massive thermonuclear exchange and then a global winter that left the Earth unpopulated by any organisms more advanced than cockroaches and accordionists. And here we are, in the ashes to prove it.

So, how is CND and its anti-nuclear family dealing with today’s new and unique nuclear world?

Well, they link to a site called Global Zero, which states the following:

In December 2008 in Paris—in response to the growing threats of proliferation and nuclear terrorism—100 leaders from around the world launched Global Zero. They announced a plan for the phased, verified elimination of nuclear weapons, starting with deep reductions in the U.S. and Russian arsenals,

…both states are still crazy bastards after all these years of UN-sponsored peace.

Remember how during the Russian invasion of Georgia last year the world waited with baited breath; fearfully watching the Peking Olympics and Big Brother 2008 and paralysed by the knowledge that sometime soon the lights in chanceries all over the world would go out, one by one, as diplomats, politicians and generals alike waited for the badminton semi-finals to come on, and Strategic Air Command went to DefconYawn ?

…to be followed by multilateral negotiations among all nuclear powers for an agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons—global zero. The growing group includes former heads of state, former foreign ministers, former defense ministers, former national security advisors, and more than 20 former top military commanders.

All that out-of-office and retired experience must contain much wisdom, I’d expect.

Global Zero gave letters to Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed by more than 90 Global Zero leaders, urging them to commit to an effort to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide as outlined in Global Zero’s policy plan; Global Zero Commissioners, Senator Chuck Hagel and Ambassador Richard Burt, met with President Medvedev in Moscow and discussed this agenda; and Global Zero presented its plan through the media, including on the morning the two presidents met in London, with an op-ed in the London Times authored by six Global Zero American and Russian political and military leaders.

At their meeting, Presidents Obama and Medvedev issued an historic joint statement committing their “two countries to achieving a nuclear free world”—beginning with reductions in their two arsenals. Three days later in a speech in Prague, President Obama declared his intention to “seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor.”

This leadership from Presidents Obama and Medvedev—matched by growing support from governments around the world—represents an historic opportunity to stop proliferation and end the nuclear threat once and for all by setting the world on the course to the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

You can see how this is going.

Obviously, three’s nothing to worry about in China’s impeccable peace record, or they’d be on the list to disarm soonest too. That whole India-Pakistan nuclear stand-off is similarly a snoozeroo to the serious-minded peace activists. South Africa is decently governed now it’s free of the Apartheid Terror, and as southern Africa becomes ever more civilized and peaceful under the enlightened leadership of such virtue-swollen luminaries of probity and empathy as Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma it’s clear there’s little reason to worry that the South African bomb will ever end up in the wrong hands.

Even the State of Israel gets pretty much a free pass from CND, and this is about as harsh that the CND website gets about the Zionist Entity, which makes it the second least anti-Semitic Left-wing organization in the world after the Faroe Islands Social Democratic Party.

Nope – the Big Bad Boys are even today such crazed religious nuts as all the Americans except for their shiny new President, the Russians (kinda, sorta), and that goose-stepping, frothing-mouthed God-botherer, eschaton -immanentizer and rooftop sniper Gordon Brown.

CND works tirelessly to prevent Trident being replaced and most of all for any anti-missile defences which are the most likely source of a Russo-American war just now in exactly the same way that equipping private homes with stout locks and electronic alarms always startles burglars into shooting their customers once they get onto the premises.

So that silly American waitress and her school drop-out son can stop blowing up all those computer factories and leave World Peace to the people with their fingers on the pulse as much now in the Twenty-First Century as they were in the pre-Ragnarok Europe of the 1980s.

Because the one thing we can depend on is that the nuclear disarmament peace-lovers are bang up to date and have it all covered.

We can rest easy in our Anderson Shelter beds knowing that they haven’t missed a thing.

Not. A. Single. Thing.

Sleep well.

Previously on Zombie Chainsaw Slugfest ...

So.

Just before we get into the nitty-gritty of precisely how the main democratic parties might choose to secure and improve our lives via primary legislation, fiscal planning and public spending, and by employing diplomacy and treaty building and through both institutional reform and the enforcement of the laws, I thought it might be helpful to list, without further commentary, some of the issues which they may choose to face on our behalf by using powers and freedoms that we have lent – or that we shortly will lend – to them.

Foreign affairs.

The government of Iran will likely soon possess nuclear weapons.

Pakistan already possesses nuclear weapons and may soon be ruled by the Taliban and its alies.

The government of North Korea possesses and is testing nuclear weapons and is sending nuclear-capable rockets over other nations’ territories.

The United States of America is nearing bankruptcy.

The US Government seems to be happy with all of the above.

Most of the oil-producing countries are governed by people who hate our way of life down to the last detail and wish to change it.

The two most populous countries in the world are undergoing massive industrial revolutions and are competing for scarce resources with us.

Almost anyone, no matter how unconnected with Britain, no matter how violent their beliefs and actions, and no matter how antagonistic they are to our country’s institutions and contemptuous of the rule of law are allowed to settle here in effect permanently.

British foreign policy is largely made by the European Commission.

The European Commission believes in, and constantly and overtly pushes for greater control of member nations’ internal affairs and diplomatic relations.

The economy.

The national debt is equal to a year’s GDP.

Government borrowing is high and getting higher.

There is a massive public pension debt on top of the national debt and only half the people are making any provision for their future incomes.

The private sector and therefore the tax base are contracting.

A workless underclass is massively dependent of welfare benefits.

Most of the banks are state owned, and aren’t lending to business.

The pound is weak.

Imported goods needed for our economic growth such as fuel and raw materials are expensive.

Of the home countries, only England is paying its way – the rest are dependent on tax revenues half or more of their incomes via disproportionately large public sector employment.

Society.

The native population - and especially the middle class - is largely childless or in one-child families. This is below recoverable replacement levels for the white population.

The elderly are increasing in number and proportion to the working population and surviving largely on tax-funded income and services.

The underclass is growing in size and is growing above the law.

Immigrant families with hostile or otherwise incompatible world-views are reproducing at much higher rates than the natives.

The academy views western civilization as inimical to moral life and is openly subverting it throughout primary, secondary, and tertiary education.

Traditional morality and the family are widely seen amongst the professional classes as opposed to happiness.

A shrinking number of people is educated to a level that they know the first thing about how we are governed, how wealth is created, and how societies grow, flourish and survive.

Government.

75% and perhaps more laws which are made each year derive from the Commission of the European Union.

Many laws are never discussed or scrutinized by Parliament.

The police have abdicated most of their authority to enforce the rule of law.

The courts have abdicated much of their authority to punish criminals.

Government concerns itself with ever-greater quality of life issues.

Government seeks to concern itself with ever-greater and more intimate areas of personal life.

Government proclaims a monopoly of the use of force: a monopoly that it shares with the lawless.

That should keep them busy for a while.

That’ll be £399.99, please.

Colour blindness

Here's what happened even very recently to hurt the innocent under Catholic Christianity when people follow their beliefs:

An investigation by the Today Programme has uncovered new evidence that Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales failed to act appropriately when dealing with paedophile priests in his former diocese of Arundel and Brighton. The Cardinal is currently the subject of a police inquiry over claims that he covered up the activities of one paedophile priest - Father Michael Hill. Yesterday Hill admitted abusing more children - some of them disabled.

Two years ago we revealed that Michael Hill's Bishop knew he was a paedophile but allowed him to continue working. That Bishop was Cormac Murphy O'Connor, then in charge of Arundel and Brighton, now the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal and Head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Documents from that original investigation confirm what the Bishop knew and when.

In July 1981 Michael Hill was sent to a therapeutic centre following concerns about his sexual behaviour. In letters, Cormac describes the matter as "very serious". He questions whether Hill should have the pastoral care of a parish.

Responding to our original investigation, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor issued a statement apologising to victims. In his defence he said the decisions he made at that time were not irresponsible and that there was a genuine ignorance among bishops, priests, and society at large about the compulsive nature of child abuse. Cold comfort for the victims of paedophile priests.


Get that?

The Catholic Church rightly saw child abuse as a sin (which it is, amongst other things), and stopped it within its own lights in the right way by extracting confession, contrition, and offering absolution and forgiveness. The cover-up was human: all-too human, and not at all praiseworthy, but still.

My point here is that belief drives actions.

I recall listening to this very BBC programme in which they articulated that it was as much Christian/Catholic theorlogy and philosophy that led to the priest concerned not being exposed, charged, and punished by the courts since back then the Cardinal was unaware that child-molesters tend to be paedophiles that have an illness resembling a dysfunction of the free will. They are compelled to do what they want, or else they consider themselves to be compelled [I'm not ruling them out from just being immoral bastards who choose not to let their consciences overrule their lusts], and they do the deed.
The Church saw these crimes purely in theological terms of sin, guilt, remores and contrition and felt that that was sufficient and the right thing to do.

Wrong, but honest.

Here's the BBC's coverage of the latest and the worst of it on their website today.
One main story only, (after all, it's in a foreign country that isn't in America or Israel) but with three links going out to other aspects of this terrible story.

Christianity is officially against child abuse (it suppressed child sacrifice and other forms of infanticide in the later Roman Empire), plus gladiatorial combat and eventually the shameful Christian share of the slave trade, and is still in the battle against abortion and euthanasia.

The secular and libertine Left hates Christianity for those reasons.

But what if it not only did the Church fail in its duty to protect children within its care from abuse, but what if it taught that child abuse was okay - indeed sanctioned at the highest level?
Would we hear the end of it, perhaps, from the BBC and its ilk?
Let's field test my theory, shall we?

Try this for size:

Luke 5: 11. 'Miriam (the Lord be pleased with her) reported: Jesus (praise him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house at the age of nine. She further said: We went to Nazareth and I had an attack of fever for a month, and my hair had come down to the earlobes. Anne (my mother) came to me and I was at that time on a swing along with my playmates. She called me loudly and I went to her and I did not know what she had wanted of me. She took hold of my hand and took me to the door, and I was saying: Ha, ha (as if I was gasping), until the agitation of my heart was over. She took me to a house, where had gathered the women of the town. They all blessed me and wished me good luck and said: May you have share in good. She (my mother) entrusted me to them. They washed my head and embellished me and nothing frightened me. The Son of God (praise him) came there in the morning, and I was entrusted to him.

and:

Romans 2: 17. 'Miriam (the Lord be pleased with her) reported: the Son of God (praise him) married her when she was seven years old, and he was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her; and when he (the Lord Jesus) died she was eighteen years old.

Do you think that our secular humanist friends would be reticent about where Christian child abuse comes from these days?

I don't think so, somehow.

Only, of course, the passages aren't from Luke and Romans, but from here.

And if you look for anything about this in the BBC website :

For many years, her father abused her in the cellar of their home. At 16 she discovered a plan to send her to Ireland for an arranged marriage, and she ran away. Hunted by her angry father and brothers, who were intent on making her an honour killing, she had to keep moving house to escape them, and complete her education. Worst of all, from her family's point of view, she converted to Islam and eventually found freedom - to live (and marry) as she wished, and to be free of the shame of her childhood.

...you won't even find the poor little girl's name: let alone any discussion of the crimes of slavery, incest, rape, torture and attempted murder.

Which tells you all you need to know about how large and powerful sections of our secular humanist leaders care about secularism, humanity, and leadership. There are going to be many honourable exeptions, but not for the mere £140 per year that is the BBC's unique source of funding.



Hat tips (thanks for the topic in the first place) to Ross and Dumb Jon.