Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

In a strangely comical way, a bizarre absurdity in fact, has grown to become a way of life.

To be plain: no-one is able to say anything with a weight of authority unless s/he is a specialist expert professional vocational scholarly in-the-field active researching player.

To be plain: no-one is able to join a trade or an industrial or commercial sector as even the lowliest employee, without them having burdens of onus placed upn them as preconditions.

Before one is able to become a building site labourer in our society one needs a health and safety badge, and a few other badges too.

More and more lines of work and employment are becoming, by emulation of the professions, what the Trades Unions of the 1970s and 1980s were hammered into demise by the press and politicians for being; items which went by different labels then, and had become dirty words: closed shops exhibiting restrictive practices.

But that was in another time and besides the Unions are dead.

In those olden days, the son of say a newspaper printing worker – all set by type in those days – was able to go into a queue so as to follow in his father’s footsteps as a print operator. Almost literally into deadmen’s shoes.

Persons without close family relatives were not able to choose the print trade as their walk of life. They were excluded by order of the strength of the Print Trade Union; which thus kept an iron grip on the trade.

This was a closed shop and the exclusivity a restrictive practice. A 1970s byword.

Thus the Trades Unions of those ‘interesting times’ shepherded along their own nemesis; and had they accepted just a little less of the cake they might have been of some consequence still today

Just as the refuse collectors were as I heard said as a child to need ‘their injections’ against dreadful diseases to be picked up from other people’s refuse; in the present day some jokey political force has ordained on high that unless one carries a piece of paper stating :I’M AN EXPERT in bicycle tyre sizes, then one is disqualified from gassing about punctures and repairs

A prince can make a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an' a' that; But an honest man's above his might, Good faith, he may not nay that! For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities an' a' that; The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, Are higher rank than a' that.

In our times, 2020 and such, the wheel and the worm has turned. The restrictive practices and the closed shops are today boots on other feet.

Our present day Pharisees like the Trade Unions of old are continuing the tradition like so:

The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

Their burdensome loads are the obstacles they put in the way, so as to hinder people seeking employment, or who have something of worth to offer. One major manifestation of this behaviour is found prevalent in the onslaught fightback of the mainstream media - which to a man combines so as to pour scorn and disrespect on online news and comment outlets - ubiquitously.

Under a flag raised for the purity of the truth of news and comment, like the Pharisees in Matthew 23; the mainstream media carry on their campaign to hold back the flood of online competition, and the exodus of ears and minds going over that Red Sea. Some of these online news and media guys and gals being better at their game than they are, and causing a direct economic, even existential, threat to that mainstream.

But like the protesters agains HS2 – the proposed West Coast highspeed rail link to the north – who babble about ‘the cost to the environment’ and the ‘ money being spent in a better way’ and who stack up millions in legal bills to have the project quashed by some obscure ruling – these protesters live in the ‘unspoilt countryside’ of Britain, and amongst the wastage of nature presided over by the agricultural industries and game hunting enterprises, golf courses and shooting parties – their real motivation for sending millions of pounds against HS2 can be said simply: “I don’t want it running near my lovely second home in the shires’

God forbid that ordinary people ‘close in the city pent’ should come anywhere near their villages; even were they only being seen through a train window looking out whilst passing.

This same disingenuous obstructiveness has been cultivated by employers, by their trade associations, by almost every mainstream outlet for news, current affairs, and social commentary. The attempt has been made quite successfully to close down freedoms of movement such as social mobility and changing one’s trade etc, to close down freedom of access to voice – other than were one to want to talk about oneself and how one lives ones life and came to be where one now is.

This is that plenty of drivel sounding off the ‘I, me, mine ‘syndrome, wherein it apears the chief motivation for making the show is to arouse a sense of inferiority in audiences who have ‘immortal longings’ in them about their hopes for future worldly success.

The interviewee quite typicaly talks beginning each sentence with the word “I”, and at each iteration of “I” making it emphatic, and so demonstrating his/her almost blind self-obsession. There follow tales of hardships overcome and efforts made and grabbing opportunities and then comes the worst drivell how ‘I have the best job in the word’ and ‘ my clientele are the most discerning’ and ‘ I provide a service second to none’ and such and so on. A complete dissociation from common life – living in the cloud somewhere – what Stevie Wonder calls ‘a pastime paradise’.

Everyone it seems is alowed to be an authority on themselves; especialy those who have least self-awareness.

But that’s the media tittle-tattle - the stuff that fills up between the ears and eyes at times of day when ‘easy-listening’ is called for and is offered as ‘light relief’.

When things need to appear more serious wheel out ‘we have with us today an Oxford – or read also Cambridge don – and now and then other patrons of the more reverend institutions of learning – and automaticaly we as listeners/viewers are suppose to assume - ‘”ah, here’s truth coming now” and lay down our wills and worship the words that follow.

That cognomen Oxford - or whaever - don or professor or reader - or such – is there to add automatic ‘gravitas’ to the issue or affair under discussion – but no-one ever listens to – nor asks for or wants to listen to - “some guy” as Douglas Adams affectionately calls those he introduces as characters to The Galaxy.

One gets a show on radio once a week called ‘Any Answers’ comes on after the ‘big guns’ - irony – of politicians and the great and good have been spouting in ‘Any Questions’ just an hour earlier on. ‘Any Answers’ is a filip to the people, giving airtime – two or three minutes – shades of Andy Warhol – to those who wish to phone in about an issue just discussed and so give their view on it.

Like in Plato’s Republic I feel that the only persons qualified by nature to do such a ‘phone in’ are those who are averse for shame from doing such a ‘phone in’. That beautiful dictum of Socrates recorded by Plato that ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing’, bears a darling stamp of humility – even in so great a man – and a pagan. If only more of our wiseacre pundits would stop their mouths and step aside from assuming authority and knowledge to themselves - trying hard to convincve a nation of the truth value and validity of their own predilections and prejudices. That goes for Oxbridge as much as for anyone.

I heard today on a current affairs show talk of a ‘behaviourist’ being called upon to speak about – someone’s behaviour! There are just to many ologies and ologists; the finicky fine nature of their subects of dicipline are far to tiny obscure fragmented and largely irrelevant.

There’s a quiz game show that begins with naming a ‘professor of general ignorance’ I believe at the University of Southampton. It’s supposed to be a joke but it’s more of a celebration of the subject matters of the show – the trailerloads of tractored trivia dumped on us in the hope that we muight produce a few saleable fungi? - than it is a reflection on the piteous parlous atomised stupid state of academe in our world today. In short – it is revelled in.

The pundits – again the pundits – so maybe it is bullshit – love to say that no-one can be a polymath these days anymore – and the reason they give is that there is so much ‘knowledge’ out there no person alone today has a hope of mastering it sufficiently to be able to be called a polymath.

There’s a great huge dollop dumped by that tractor being something uncertain between information and assumed present day knowledge – and the discernment distinction is going, gone between them. But this is another argument.

Too many jollies in academies is my beef. Too many tinpot professors of children’s toliet paper before 1945; or of hard tack on navy ships of the line before Nelson and so on. Millions, billions of pounds spent on providing jollies to people for the most part living sheltered and cushioned lives without a clue or care about the greater things and the grievous problems going on perpetually around us in the world.

Huge centridfuges, colliders, dendrology and facial reconsruction, chemical and dating analysis labs – huge indulgences huge wastage of good resources which people need much more so elsewhere to help them.

You may quote Malvolio at me ‘Because thou are virtuous dost thou think there shall be no more cakes and ale?’. And indeed in every life there should be a place for leisure, respite, relaxation recouperation and re-evaluations – but a life all liesure and relaxation, and so a life removing its occupants away from the dire difficulties of others is a life of debauchery and is decadent – and that is where we are!

I pray to God that our nation and the Westerm World and the remaining nations will awaken and see for the first time more clearly how it is – those Great Commissions Our Lord has left for us as a privilege and a happy duty to fulfill in His Name.

It really is this jiggery-pokery swanning about as experts and drama queens and look at mes and who careses – all of this is a blasphemy – a mistaken error and a lure into a life that ends with nothing solid to show for it having been lived. This is what so much arouses me and my perplexed animated outrage. How dare these people – and there are so many of them - waste so squalidiy so wantonly and thoughtlessly such a great gift as life given them from their Creator in His love and on terms very generous?

To go on now to say a few words about fardels, obstacles put in place by employers – the contemporary and pharisaical heirs of the Trades Unions of Britian of recent times.

Our auspicious governments have decreed that this be the age of deregulation – of giving commerce and business a free hand a free rein to hire and fire and make employees dance the jig as they please.

The levels of employment are high but the calibre of jobs occupied is in large part dreadul. Young persons particlaurly scratching around doing two or three zero hour contract jobs together to get a wage as close to a living wage. The onus of self-employment has fallen on so manyof them. This means National Insurance costs, pension contributions, sick pay, workwear and equipment, and all other once taken as given ‘perks’ are now laid upon the working person to bear and to provide for.

And when one does get an employer and gains employee status – the idea that employee was a status was never heard of before! - one has had beforehand to go through hoops to become so ‘lucky’.

Pay is generally low; too many people who are established soaking up most of the wealth created in the nation – too little offered to those working as best they can to become established – too little income, training, general helps once prevalent now denied them.

This is the sullied fruit of detregulation – the regulations have been passed down the chain of production and supply to the consumers, the self –employed - and to those who would become employees. Instead of providing training an employer now asks for a person qualified – I.e ready trained – and such a person if entering the jobs market as a young person is expected to have stumped up the money for the cost of his her training certificates, privately or via family pooling resources.

The universities are now training workshops for employers – or alternatively waste of time degrees for a menial self employed. Everywhere one goes the cry is the same – paypaypay – even for provision of simple common courtesies in many instances.

Thus everyone is like the Lion and Tin Man and Scarecrow in Oz – they get a piece of paper or a badge that says – THIS IS WHO I AM – as if paper had a magic property to authenticate a living being as a proper person.

Nothing but nothing is left untouched – thereby closing down the jobs markets so that employers - and the robbers of the self -employed – have the pitch and the game wholly in their possession

The government rejoinder? – we’d like to see everyone owning a business and propsering. Absurdity! Who will work for you if everyone else is working for themselves? I know – a one man band steelworks or water company! It’s hooch, pure distilled moonshine. Perhaps of methyl alcohol and everyone is going blind?

This passing the buck of regulation down the chain to the worker relieves business of costs and complications and also frees it up to concentrate on earning, not on laying out. Also the candiate for employment is constrained to produce the goods, the evidence, that s/he is qualified, even if not suitable nor capable of working in the post. The piece of paper says you can do it – that’s enough!!

Going around by foot or cycle to companies touting for work is unproductive. Everything has to be done just so in a mad preset-in-stone labyrinthine session which acts to filter out many good persons.

Commonly commonplace employers like Lidl and Aldi and other such rubbish firms ask prospective candidates to go through a good hour’s worth of online vetting; all the while these firms hoovering up reams of information data about candiadtes as the quizzing continues - and lo, one gets an electronic answer about whether one is suitable or not.

Zero feed back nil accountability nil proper guidance about where the data goes how it is used whether you have consented – a usual ‘trick’ obnoxious and profane – is to say that if a candidate chooses to proceed with the quizzing that the candidate automaticaly is giving consent. Thus if you wan to work for these guys you must first of all sign away and over to them reams of detail about whom you feel yourself to be.

Yet on their side they can just dismiss you and say a loud NO simply by means of an electronic algorithm set up and populated by questions from some unknown supposed jumped up authority on work candidates – the stupid expert who barely knows how to make a cup of tea and has never used a washing machine in his/her life.

Treatment then of candiates is summary and without compunction or grace. These people in these firms ought to be ashamed of themselves. One finds better manners in a zoo at the chimpanzee communities. But manners don’t accrue profits and cost time and more staff being hired to say a non-elcetronic sorry no thanks.

But to have been relegated by machine and no route of appeal – not even a face let alone a human word passed – this is our reliance on machinery and on avoiding the face to face consequences, justifications, of our actions and decisions.

As much as possible done inhumanely by IT. Ostensibly to save costs of labour but in general – like the HS2 protester – to make ‘executive’ judgements on people without having to bear their questioning and wrath. Avoidance. Cowardice. Grovelling ill-manners.

Thus the appearance of the ‘behaviourist’ on the show who is able by his ‘craft and sullen art’ to depersonalise the inimate, make it seem science and therefore truth (ahem!!), and offer some dubious and flawed credibility of authority.

The same story as the online vetting by the supermarkets – avoid biting the bullet but yet have the bullet bitten for you by remote control anyway.

Finally where are we now? - in the middle of a ludicrous debacle about a virus. Shop assistants behaving like petty police, and unfriendly faces girning nastily at you when you pass them by in the street. A bottle of Dettol in every pile of shopping baskets and trolleys – for general use – and checkout people wiping down counters after every customer.

For so many years now the bogey of germs has been the joker that trumps all in the pack for the advertising of products which do one as much if not more harm than good by their disinfectant, antiseptic, and sterilising actions.

How many times have you heard it’s good to clear out your gut of bacteria; that this item is an unhealthy food and that one is a pathogen – coffee, butter, eggs, bacon, bananas, are just a few for which horror stories have been in action.

Not published on suspect online media so much as by those candid truth-ridden mainstream guys. How many illnesses or conditions have been fabricated around new on the market branded products? How many fright of your life commercials about hidden bends and lurking dirts have you had to sit through? So that shoppers flinch and are repelled when they are expected to buy a loaf not sealed in plastic wrap; or whenthey pass a ‘naked’ wet fish trader not ‘properly’ presented on a supermarket cool slab. This is where we are.

Perhaps this virus is the cause of the biggest technologically-assisted phobia and its symptoms - being a culmination of all this ‘nature the adversary’ nonsense and this ‘science in the service of man’ stuff.

So many of us are shadows – liiving in a mind wrapped in clingfilm, irradiated, divorced utterly from a feeling for the natural world as partner or steward to humanity. I tell my son that as long as nature continues to work – so long are we assured as a species. It is nature which is the buddy and science has set up nature to be the baddie, so as to be able to better bask in its own deluded virtues.

Just as we seem to believe we need everything on a piece of (virtual) paper so as to authenticate a thing; so we seem to believe we need everything sanitised and set in order like ducks – packaged, protected, refundable, assured, guaranteed, like a people frightened of its own shadows.

What a sorry stock of population we are! Too long too well cocooned. Even now we talk of defeating nature and of living on Mars in colonies by 2200 – as if men and women can do anything – which again is blasphemous.

Our opposition to nature and our pie in the sky ambition for ourselves is has been and continues to be our undoing – just a little less of the cake means a better portion for all – not only for less fortunate peoples – but also for the world, nature, heallth, resources, cleanliness of environment – everyone wins – we have only to rein in our heretofore avaricious and unrestrained appetities. A little at first - and see and appreciate how it pays off – so to encourage some more restraint, so that less becomes more life, and onwards to Love’s abundance. Attachments area