The following letter, written by John Stevenson, President of the UNISON public-service trade-union, City of Edinburgh Branch, appeared in Thursday's Edinburgh Evening News. It concerns the accelerating privatisation of public services under the Lib-Con coalition.

In an otherwise enlightened article on council funding and privatisation (Counting the cost of public service cuts, News, July 27), Rory Reynolds spoils it when he says, "the status quo is unsustainable".

Thank goodness the government after the Second World War was not so defeatist. At that time, the national debt (as a percentage of Gross National Product) was three times the current debt.

"Yet the country managed to create the NHS, create proper pensions and and instigate the biggest social housing programme ever seen. (On edit: Also, nationalisation and extension of what became a wonderful national transport system, each bus with a BUS CONDUCTOR, as well as the driver).

By all means report on the current financial crisis facing the council, but don't fall for the Con-Lib spin that there is no alterative.

Let's have a real debate about the so-called 'crisis'. Let's learn from the rebuilding in the USA after the depression.

If Edinburgh is sold off, it will not just be the essential public services that are cut, but the thousands of businesses that rely on them. Sold off to multinationals with no base in the city, not for efficiency, but for profit - and to allow councillors to pass the buck and say, 'It was the big company that didn't deliver, not us'.

The cuts we face are ideological, not financial. We need to wake up to that."

In another connection, not unrelated...

'Demented' cartoon by Jackie Fleming in the Mail on Sunday's supplement, 'You': a middle-aged couple sitting on their sofa, he, looking a little gormless, she, reading a book. He asks, 'Why would they cut incapacity benefit, when there are billions owing in the tax avoidance of the rich....?' Without looking up, she responds, 'They are the rich'.

... nuff said.

Of course, it could be applied to the whole of the safety-net of public services, they'll be eyeing covetously.

Leaving produce in the fields and on the trees, after the first harvesting, for the poor man and the wayfarer?

In the Gospels, we are told that (even at the time of Christ), the Gentiles - and I speak as one - were a byword for cruelty among the Jews, whose leaders could not, themselves, have anyone crucified.

It's profound truths could not be more beautifully expressed, either.

'They consider anyone who observes the dances to be participants in their prayers, and that is what happens, from my experience. I don't have to know what it "means".... I just have to be there and be open.'

There is an old Roman Catholic saying, 'to work is to pray' (laborare est orare), obviously, assuming the proper disposition of the heart, which is to glorify God in all we do. How much more would this apply to 'dance', especially when accompanied by the people singing. Praise is considered the highest form of worship, and 'song', it's highest expression.

In your reference to 'absorbing', you implicitly reiterate the truth Aldous Huxley addressed in such a fascinating manner in his essay on comparative religion, The Perennial Philosophy, namely, that spiritual truth is not accessed by the worldly intelligence, associated with the brain. And that, in a remarkably ingnorant 'scientismificist' way.

http://science-spirituality.blogspot.com/s...

Wisdom has always been considered the province of the heart, and that, for a very good reason. The deepest truths are all together too abstruse, complex and dynamic to be perceived by the conscious processes of the brain, but are, to borrow your word, 'absorbed', and synthesised to form the basis of our assumptions. Some individuals plainly prefer falsehood and reject them in favour of their own fairy-tales, such as those cherished by our scientismificist friend*; but, in the same way, it is the heart that makes the choice. The human soul consists of the memory, the will and the understanding.

On the level of our assumptions, we believe what we want to believe. We are all, in a sense, 'wishful thinkers'. It just happens that God had made and sustains the world in accordance with the way his own flock, his own 'wishful thinkers' would have it. Not a random juxtaposition of molecules, but a place in which our trials, be they never so hideous, are correspondingly rewarded, often, to some extent, in this life, and then more than fully, in the next; in which the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, not pre-Macondo gusher, BP's, annual report, are held and cherished as the most sublime conceivable text. I don't believe any true martyr, even in such ante-chambers to hell, as Abu Ghraib, will have died without some theophany of God's love in this life and the next. Just as Christ's transfiguration and his miracles (the most spectacular, mostly reserved for witness by only his closest followers) were accorded to them, to prepare them for his imminent, atrocious torture and crucufixion.

The philosophical school linking our knowledge with our volition is apparenty called, 'voluntarism'. It is the basis of all Christ's Gospel teachings - and how could it not be? We shall, after all be judged not on what we know with our wordly intelligence, but on the habitual disposition of our hearts. Otherwise, our current cruel and rapacious elites would triumph yet again in the next life, and we are told in one of the New Testament Epistles that God chooses the poor to be rich in faith.

And with this faith, we return to the abstruse nature of wisdom. It has much more to do with commitment to a selfless love of God, as imperatively expressed through love of our neighbour, than with our conscious 'belief', 'credence', still less 'credulity'. Again, as St James, I think, tells us, 'The devil believes in God and trembles.' The so-called, theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Love, are really a continuum - though the same could be said of all the virtues, in respect of which Love is the indispensable 'active ingredient'.

*Scientismificists, and doubtless not a few high-flyers in the scientific field, are so pedantic and limited in their world-view, that, as some genuinely eminent scientist/thinker, possibly Einstein, pointed out, before a new paradigm becomes understood and accepted, it takes the emergence of a new generation, who grew up with it! Hence the living epistemological fossils, with their 18th century - even 17th century beliefs, such as highfructosesugar.

know where he's going. He doesn't now who he is."

should understand: that you suffer in direct ratio to your transgressions against the natural world. The natural world will prevail.” – Chief Oren Lyons

Why is it that the deepest, most ironical truths, when uttered matter-of-factly, can convulse us with laughter. I mean, what Chief Oren Lyons said made me laugh louder than I've laughed in months. And yet, it's basically a matter of life and death on the global scale. But, you know... personifying nature's want of mercy like that!

As a matter of fact, James Howard Kunstler speaks in a very similar vein, though I think his black sense of humour is more like mine, than like H2O's, Chief Lyons' - or Christ's, whose own sense of humour seemed to have been every bit as bitter as the truths he articulated were serious. Like my late uncle Bill's, who'd get very upset if you laughed.

Now, I'm going to read Chief Lyons' next insights, with just that little bit of frivolousness that makes me hope it's as darkly humorous as the first.

the Cubans' treatment of anti-Cuban terrorists!

Why I do I have this overwhelming impression that, as Lloyd George said of Chamberlain's grasp of foreign policy, mutatis mutandis, you are looking at this financial-regulation Bill through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe?

 

It might not be too long before every person on the planet capable of speech gets down on their knees and prays the Our Father every morning. Noon and night too, for that matter.

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- in this case, possibly sexually-depraved behaviour - by US law-enforcement personnel of one stripe or another.

Someone posts here, reporting it, then a swarm of other DUers respond, either by claiming it was perfectly justified by the behaviour or even the demeanour of the victim, or, as in this case, admitting the enormity of it, really, in passing, and then going on to write a whole screed about what bureaucratic or security dereliction the victim nevertheless might have been guilty of. The post was not written in order to elicit from those knowledgeable on the subject, the particular applicable regulations, or the lack of wisdom of the victim in breeching one or more of them, but to report an UNFORGIVABLE OUTRAGE!

Just, no sense of proportion or relevance to the very simple issue of the unambiguous outrage by a public servant(s) perpetrated on a member of the public - one that would be quite inconceivable in Europe, for example, in such a context; probably, no other first or second-world country.

It's only a matter of time before the psychopaths achieve hegemony and they twist even the most unambiguous criticism against them, while praising the authors to the heavens for precepts, which, far from being a central part of their teaching, they, in fact, vehemently opposed.

Adam Smith is a prime example: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

Take good note of the term, 'the masters of mankind'. Ponder it in general terms; but also ponder it in specific terms. Who are currently the masters of mankind? Who call the shots? Who does Obama have to defer to?

Smith goes right to the heart of the problem: regulate THEM, because they are anarchists who will impose their 'freedoms' on mankind.

In his essay on comparative religion, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley addresses man's hubris and the eventual nemesis visited upon him, ascribing some blame to the injunctions in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures for man to assume dominion over creation. However, it is Man's fallen nature which leads him to abuse that power, and part of his quasi divine dignity to exercise such dominion in a humble, respectful, responsible and loving manner.