Faith, the final frontier. Its continuing mission: to seek answers about the known pooliverse by looking in to your heart not out to the eyes in the sky .
Faith, the final frontier. Its continuing mission: to seek answers about the known pooliverse by looking in to your heart not out to the eyes in the sky .
I have just read a VERY interesting book called "Fingerprints of the Gods." It explores the ancient civilizations of Egypt & South America, the buildings they left behind and the various myths concerning global events and things like that. What it concludes is that there was a very advanced and knowledgeable population in seriously remote history (looking at around 10-11,000 BC here), that understood spherical geometry as relates to the Earth, understood how the planet moved through space (precession and all that) and set all this down through the medium of what we would consider religious myths. Essentially, the church is an ancient science cult. Not just Christianity either - there are something like 200 odd versions of the Noah myth for example, from all corners of the world, which could have only been conjured up independently of each other, which seem to indicate a period of extremely high sea levels and serious seismic activity which ties in with the end of the last ice age.... Astrology was just one of the tools the ancients left to allow future civilizations to work out precession & things of that ilk.
Quite aware that I'm waffling now, but it's a very good book, I'd recommend it gets read
Originally Posted by The Quentos
I did start to read that book, but it got a bit heavy going so I gave up. The bits about the pyramids lining up and the Nazca lines was fascinating though...
I can certainly see this as being a hit amongst the Tory faithful. Every Tory knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The Health Secretary of State could claim to cut the cost of the NHS by using this radical but completely bonkers idea. Above all, David Cameron attempts to pitch this to work working families as a time saving interaction. Why spend all that time and money on exploratory tests and consultations when an astrology could do just as an effective job.
This piece of policy sits nicely with the bedroom tax, giving the rich more tax breaks at the time of austerity, austerity cuts which resulted in the longest history recession in the last 100 years.
Cheap Tory bashing. Anyone who believes in magical divine beings or forces with absolutely no proof is deluded. And sadly there are a lot of God botherers in parliament.
The so-called "bedroom tax" is absolurely right in principle. The problem is with the implementation.
As for the recession, who was in power when it happened? Who had been running the economy for 10 years, when it happened?
Who had been spending money like it grew on trees?
And, by the way, it yas not been the longest recession. Not by a very large margin. What is has been is one of the deepest, and the recovery has been very slow. The question is why?
One major reason is that, traditionally, a major part of the way out of a recession is to export. After all, in a recession, the home country is hit hard, money is tight, consumer confidence clobbered, business investment down or stopped, and therefore growing your way out using domestic markets is hard. So you export. Trouble is, our major markets wrre hit hard, too. The US suffered badly, and the EU, especially the eurozone, still is. Significant parts of it are still in real trouble, and the eurozone as a whole is managing what, 0.2% growth?
It's very hard to export your way out of trouble when nobody's buying.
Nor is spend, spend, spend an answer. If we, as a country, do that, all that happens is that our debt gets worse and worse. The first result is that interest rates rise, and I mean the rates government pays to borrow. Look at Italy, Spain, etc, then look at UK rates. But private rates follow. Who, in current times, wants to see a huge increase in their mortgage payments?
We MUST keep every cost we can down as much as we can, and concentrate what dpending we do do in areas designed explicitly to boost national productivity. That might be infrastructure (though not politically motivated ego-trips like HS2), it might be apprenticeshops or re-training for older people, it might be start-up help for new businesses, and do on.
What it can't be is simply protecting the living standards of those than can afford to take a hit. And yes, a lot can't afford to take a hit, and need to be helped, but a lot can take a reduction .... but simply don't like to. Well, nobody does, but the simple fact remains this country has been living on debt, both government and consumer, for far too long, because successive governments have spent what we can't afford, AND encouraged consumers to do likewise (such as not letting the air out of the housing bubble), and done it for short-term political gain, not sound long-term economic benefit.
Is the so-called 'austerity' popular? If course not. Only stupid turkeys enjoy the approach of Christmas. But the nations finsnces are what they are, and the very worst thing you can do with big debt is ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. The pain of sorting out your debt is a lot better than having bailiff's at the nation's door.
Except it wasn't. Remember, we've been over this, recession has a formal definition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...United_Kingdom
Just remember that they only started the Tory austerity once they'd grabbed power with the Lib Dems.
Now, if you want to be a good socialist, you need to start putting all those pesky textbooks down the memory holes, so you can remind us how we've always been at war with Eurasia.
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Sorry chaps, I have to disagree with your lack of economics knowledge.
The Tory economic policies have made our debts worse and divided our people.
Here's a chart of our debts. Enjoy!
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It's a complete myth that the Tories are able to run nation's finance as a tight ship. If you add up the budget deficits and surpluses since the end of the second world war, Tories comes out worst than Labour.
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Thanks Tories for making our debts worse.
The top comment on the Beeb article, attributed to Tim Minchin:
"By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work?
Medicine"
Generally I look along the years and see how much the debt increased
Did Labour completely fix the crisis by the time they were out of power then?Labour had to deal with the banking crisis in 2007/08. No such crisis happened under the Tories.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not at all pro-conservatives, however you can't bandy around comments questioning peoples economic understanding without backing up what you say with a bit more clarity. I personally think both sides did an OK job - Labour opened the purse strings badly, but that was (IMHO) needed. Conservative are mopping up by tightening the strings, and that's needed as well. By hook or by crook, we've come out (albeit perilously), quicker than just about any other country that was also affected.
Actually your questions suggests you didn't understand the scale of the banking crisis. All banking crisis takes a long time to resolve themselves. Look at Japan with their banking crisis in 1997. I'm afraid sorting out a banking crisis doesn't happen overnight. Austerity will continue well into the next government.
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