Wednesday 15 December 2010

Who Says We Are All In It Together?

Who Says We Are All In It Together?: "Currently the top 1% of the population owns 23% of the wealth, while the lowest 50% of the population share 7% of the wealth between them. This is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth in this country and it shows how unjust our economic system really is."

Thursday 2 December 2010

Sandy Back: the true heart of Whitstable

Sandy Back: the true heart of Whitstable: "Maybe we are all immortal beings, made mortal in order to learn the secrets of love."

Thursday 25 November 2010

An Optimist Considers 2012 and other stories

An Optimist Considers 2012 and other stories: "An optimist is someone who believes thatthings will always turn out for the best. A pessimist is someone who believes that things will always turn out for the worst.

They are both right about half the time, and wrong about half the time. The difference is that the optimist has a far more enjoyable time while he’s at it."

Sunday 14 November 2010

Save Whitstable and Herne Bay Delivery Offices

Save Whitstable and Herne Bay Delivery Offices: "There are about fifty workers in the Whitstable office. Every one of them will have to do four car journeys a day: into and out of work, and to and from their round. That’s two hundred car journeys every day in place of one lorry-load of letters."

Tuesday 19 October 2010

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Gnosticism, The Roman Empire and the Myth of Christ.

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Gnosticism, The Roman Empire and the Myth of Christ.: "The words “Pistis” and “Sophia” mean “Faith” and “Wisdom”. It is the name given by the Gnostics to the female spiritual principle. She is their goddess. It’s a startling fact that this Christian group acknowledged a goddess figure in their pantheon, and that they equated the God of the Old Testament with such negative concepts as blind thought and blasphemy."

Wednesday 15 September 2010

Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug and other stories

Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug and other stories: "Sometimes some of our beliefs make some sort of sense. But often they don’t. Some of our beliefs have been inculcated into us since early childhood. They’ve been repeated so often we take them for the truth. Our whole world is built around received belief-systems such as this.

Personally I always retain a healthy scepticism about anyone’s beliefs… and that includes my own."

Sunday 12 September 2010

Stonehenge and Civilisation

Stonehenge and Civilisation: "It probably took over a thousand years to build, from its first to its last, and was in constant use for several thousand years after that. Indeed, you could say that it has never really gone out of use, if my visit to see the sunrise with Joe can be counted too. Who are we but the latest in a long line of visitors come to admire and wonder at this mysterious structure?"

Landscape and Possession

Landscape and Possession: "That is what I mean by possession.

When a ghost enters a man we say he is possessed.

But what if he is already possessed and he no longer knows it?

What if the mind that he carries around in his head isn’t his real mind at all?

What if it isn’t just one man, but all of humanity that is possessed? Possessed by the demon of possession, in fact, by the mistaken belief that anyone can ever own anything."

Wednesday 8 September 2010

Weird is the English Word for Fate

Weird is the English Word for Fate: "When fate casts its strange shadow – as it does sometimes – over the ordinary processes of our lives, it does so with reason. Fate is the question we ask of ourselves. Fate is the choice we are given. Once we have made that choice, then our lives are determined by it. But the moment of fate itself is actually the moment of greatest freedom."

Wednesday 1 September 2010

Schrodinger’s Uncertain Cat

Schrodinger’s Uncertain Cat: "you can’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box, because you can’t know if the atom has decayed or not. Mr Schrodinger merely posited the cat as a way of highlighting the weird contradictions inherent in the world of Quantum Mechanics; that is, on the small scale of atoms and subatomic particles."

Monday 30 August 2010

Dancing With The Demons

Dancing With The Demons: "From poppy tea to codeine tabs, from cough linctus to “chasing the dragon”, from skin popping to, finally, the whole junkie works, the needle, the spoon and the tourniquet. To him this was all the height of romance, like dancing with the demons, like a love affair with death. It was his version of poetry."

Thursday 26 August 2010

Mental Arithmetic

Mental Arithmetic: "What are the kids being taught these days? At one stage they were allowed to use calculators in their maths exams. I don’t know if this is still the case, but one thing is certain: they can’t add up any more."

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Believe it or Not

Believe it or Not: "People believe a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true. In the case of that shop-assistant, she had obviously rung the wrong figure into the till, and when offered a choice between what the till was saying and the word of a customer, preferred to believe the till."

Tsunami: Where Was God?

Tsunami: Where Was God?: "One extremist Muslim said that it was a punishment for tight clothing, while the most profound statement came from a Hindu woman whose son had been swept away in the Tsunami. She was grief stricken but resigned. “God has returned to God,” she said."

Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug?

Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug?: "Plus when people find out that they are not instantly and irrecoverably addicted to cannabis after a few smokes, they begin to disbelieve the official line on drugs as a whole, and to imagine that they can handle heroin in the same way."

Monday 1 February 2010

Driver's License

Driver's License: "My Dad has just had his driver’s license taken off him, having failed his compulsory eye-test. I drove him back from the test centre."

Views on The Law of Attraction

Views on The Law of Attraction: "The Law of Attraction” is little more than a giant pyramid scheme selling wish-fulfilment fantasy."