The Antichrist Looks a Lot Like Something We've Seen

Rings a bell?

The Antichrist:

1) will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity, and plenty, not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves. 

2) He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live.

3) He will induce faith in astrology so as to make not the will but the stars responsible for our sins.

4) He will explain guilt away psychologically as repressed sex, make men shrink in shame if their fellowmen say they are not broadminded and liberal.

5) He will identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong.

6) He will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is “vital.”

7) He will increase love for love and decrease love for persons.

8) He will invoke religion to destroy religion.

9) He will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived.

10) His mission, he will say, will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and Fascism, which he will never define.

11) In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; he will not believe in God. And because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.

12) He will set up a counter-Church, which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will be the mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the Church as the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man, in his loneliness and frustration, to hunger more and more for membership in his community that will give man enlargement of purpose, without any need of personal amendment and without the admission of personal guilt. These are days in which the devil has been given a particularly long rope.

Thanks to https://churchpop.com/2018/05/21/the-12-tricks-of-the-anti-christ-to-steal-souls-according-to-the-ven-archbishop-fulton-sheen/

Men Cannot Predict Consequences

How many times have we stubbornly and ardently wanted something, and maybe got out of our way and moved heaven and earth to make it happen, only to realise in the end not only and not so much that it was not worth it, but above all that it was not for our benefit at all, and that it would even have been better if the opposite had occurred?

It is sufficient to think, furthermore, of the heterogony of ends, or the unintended consequences of intentional actions, of which the most macroscopic examples are the side effects of drugs and the laws of the state.

All this is telling us that often we are not able to foresee, understand and evaluate the medium- and long-term consequences of actions or events, in a nutshell we can't see beyond the end of our nose.

This is not the only but one of the fundamental reasons why any consequentialist ethical system, namely a system for which every choice of a moral agent must be guided by the evaluation of the consequences that will derive from each alternative choice, can only fail.

We have many examples of great historical significance of this disastrous, catastrophic failure to foresee the consequences until the total reversal of intent.

An example is offered - unintentionally, of course - exactly by a philosopher who is the representative of a consequentialist school of thought, utilitarianism, which we will discuss below: the contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

In his book One World published in 2002, Singer vigorously defends mass immigration from Third World countries to those of the First, arguing on a utilitarian basis that, while the possible inconveniences, if ever there are, for the peoples of the latter are mild, they are nothing compared to the good that immigration into rich nations brings to the poor of the world (Singer, an ethnic Jew, would perfectly agree with Pope Francis).

The Princeton professor arrives (or arrived, in 2002) to the point of saying that the European countries and North America should greatly increase the number of immigrants they welcome.

With the benefit of hindsight, which is 20/20, I do not know if Peter has changed his mind. I know however that the events that followed have completely refuted him, even from within his own viewpoint. That's because the type of immigration from poor regions to rich regions that he advocated has had - and is continuing to have on an ever-increasing scale - the consequence of spreading Islam in the Western world, once Christian and still preserving some traces of the virtues and attitudes arising from Christianity, including doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Once the ethnic, cultural and religious replacement of Christianity with Islam will to a good extent be accomplished - not only for the purely demographic reasons of the different degree of reproduction between Muslims and native Westerners but even more so because a society, especially as complex as ours, cannot exist without religion, and it would be destined to collapse (but this is a subject for another article) -, what will happen to us is what is happening in the rich Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which erect walls and close their borders to their Muslim "brothers" of Syria.

This is how Singer's pro-immigration recommendation, which would have the self-declared intention to help the world's poor, will result in the rich countries' changed nature - changed exactly thanks to the application of the precepts and prescriptions of this utilitarian philosopher -, which in turn will have the direct consequence of making them much more reluctant to help the poor.

Another clamorous example of miscalculation is that of another Jewish and atheist philosopher, Karl Marx.

All or almost all the predictions that Marx derived from his diabolical theory have been refuted by that giant laboratory that is history, proving that his theory is indeed scientific, as he called it, but at the same time false.

In particular, Marx thought that the only relationships that matter, the only dynamic relationships, were those between man and man, social.

The other relational aspect of the economy, that is the relationship between man and nature, this communist man par excellence saw as active only on the part of man, and purely passive on the part of nature.

Unlike for others of his ideas, Marx cannot be blamed for having had this idea.

In the nineteenth century it would have been very difficult, indeed impossible, to foresee ecological disasters, to think that the environment could, so to speak, "rebel". Certain phenomena needed to take place, events to occur, ideas to be developed and understood before we could make similar predictions.

But this is yet another demonstration of human incapacity for far-sightedness.

Finally, I mention only briefly - with the intention of developing it more fully another time - the so-called "sexual liberation", that orgy of promiscuity and libertinage that has engulfed and enveloped the West at least starting from the notorious sixties on.

It's only love, said Oscar Wilde. Make love not war, the hippies echoed. Who could think that something bad could come from "love"? That chaos could derive from "love"?

Well, there was someone who understood it. And he understood it precisely because he was going against the current, and his foresight came from far away, from very far away, from another world.

I'm talking about Paul VI and his encyclical Humane Vitae, in which, perhaps enlightened by the Holy Spirit and certainly on the basis of a true doctrine - predictive ability is the test of truth -, he was able to foresee, already in the now distant 1968 (so much water has passed under the bridge), those many and serious evils that we later saw.

Yet again evidence that are not men alone, without supernatural help, who are able to see far away.

Utilitarianism, founded by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (also influenced by the Italian Cesare Beccaria and his treatise Dei delitti e delle pene), is a consequentialist moral theory of the kind described at the beginning of this article.

For it the right moral action in all circumstances is that which is expected to result in maximum utility, understood as the greatest pleasure and happiness for the largest number of moral patients - that is, all those who will suffer the consequences of such action - and the least pain and unhappiness for the least number of them.

What one feels, the feeling, both physical, as sensation, and psychic, as emotion, reigns supreme.

In fact what else can be the foundation of an ethical system that has been deprived of God, what other rational basis can it find? It is the triumph of the purest materialism.

There are other ethical systems without God besides utilitarianism, but the latter is perhaps the one that best represents the atheistic position.

Once the feelings of pleasure at the pillar of the whole moral system have been erected, and provided with a somewhat rational basis (the so-called "utilitarian" calculation), it has infiltrated European culture and, by extension, Western spasmodic research, not to say obsessive, of pleasure itself, by any means: "natural" - sex -, artificial - chemically, with drugs, alcohol, sweets, excess and excessive consumption of food -, possession of wealth, power, material goods, obsession with shopping, and so on.

This article is also in Italian, here.

There Is No Such Thing As Humane Slaughter

I'm not reproducing here the horrendous pictures of animals tortured in an abattoir by bored staff, filmed earlier this year by an animal protection group in (ironically named) Vigan, France.

You can see them by clicking on this link to an article in The Daily Express.

And don't think that these things don't happen in Britain. They do, as it's been repeatedly exposed in undercover reports by worthy organisations like Animal Aid.

The Animal Aid exposes have been covered by mainstream media, for example here in The Telegraph.

Make no mistake: both ritual (halal for Muslims and kosher for Jews) and nonritual slaughterhouses are horrifically cruel, although the former a bit more than the latter.

If you find even watching these graphic images hard to bear, think of the animals who must endure these ordeals on their own flesh and skin.

And, especially, think of that when you buy or eat meat.

There's More to Pumpkin Seeds than You Ever Thought

I love pumpkin seeds for their taste, and recently I started snacking on them in the late evening before going to bed.

After a while I noticed that I was falling asleep much more easily than had been the case for some time. A persistent cold and cough I had been suffering from had also disappeared.

The causes can be manifold, of course, but I noticed the strange coincidences and I decided to look up the health benefits of pumpkin seeds, if any existed: I wasn't even aware that they possessed them, for if you like the taste of a particular food you're not inclined to dwell too much on the question of whether it's good for you. Just in case you find out that it isn't.

From my research it turned out that the improvements I had discovered in myself could likely have been the result of consuming this great food, which, according to Nutrition Research Reviews, has indeed many medicinal properties.

The report of a study published in Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences and entitled "The effects of methanolic, chloroform, and ethylacetate extracts of the Cucurbita pepo L. on the delay type hypersensitivity and antibody production" starts in this way:

Pumpkin, as a dietary plant, has been used in traditional medicine around the world. In addition, during the last decade, antidiabetic, antihypertensive, antitumor, intestinal antiparasitic, antibacterial, anti hypercholesterolemia, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory and analgic effects of pumpkin has been reported.

The study in itself is performed on mice therefore, as is well known, the application to humans is extremely unsafe. But the essay's introduction indicates the scientific recognition of this plant's health benefits.

Pumpkin seeds contain the vegetable compounds phytosterols, as well as free-radical scavenging antioxidants, also useful.

The 2015 study "Evaluation of the potential of squash pumpkin by-products (seeds and shell) as sources of antioxidant and bioactive compounds" concludes:

This work shows that the residues produced from agro-food industries, like pumpkin shells and seeds are potentially good sources of antioxidant compounds like polyphenols, beneficial for human health. Therefore it is of high interest to develop low cost/effective methods of processing to transform them in added value co-products.

Pumpkin seeds and their oil have benefits for postmenopausal women.

For men's health as well, pumpkin seeds have long been known to be important. Their high zinc content is beneficial for the prostate. Studies have shown that their oil can be used in the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia, namely enlarged prostate gland.

Research results published in the Journal of Food Science and Technology show that pumpkin contains appreciable amounts of important nutrients, including calcium, iron, zinc, total dietary fibre and β-carotene.

Zinc, of which pumpkin seeds are rich, has many crucial functions, including sleep, insulin regulation, mood, eye and skin health, and particularly it supports the immune system. Zinc deficiency is common in our societies, and that leads to increased incidence of colds and flu, as well as depression and chronic fatigue. The boost to my immune system from pumpkin seeds could explain my better resistance to cold and cough.

And what about my own experience of falling asleep more easily? That link with pumpkin seeds too has found confirmation in scientific literature.

Pumpkin seeds are rich in the amino acid tryptophan (proteins are complex molecules made of amino acids), that the body converts into the highly precious neurotransmitter serotonin which in turn is converted into melatonin, called the "sleep hormone". Research has found that protein source tryptophan is comparable to pharmaceutical grade tryptophan for the treatment of insomnia.

In addition, pumpkin seeds are cheap, easy to eat, easy to carry, don't require cooking, etc etc.

In case you are thinking that I have invested in pumpkin seed companies' shares or otherwise have vested interests in them, I haven't. But now I may be starting giving it a thought.

Redefining Marriage in Italy Is Not so Easy

Published on Catholic World Report

By Enza Ferreri


Recently Catholic World Report published an article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci on how “Italy is the last remaining nation in Western Europe to hold out against the recognition of civil partnerships” and how the Church hierarchy, in particular the Italian Bishops’ Conference, has not always been as straightforward as desired on this theme.

It was followed a few days later by a piece on the website of the Culture of Life Foundation entitled Italy Debates The Definition Of “Family”…A Half-Century Too Late, by Steve Soukup.

First the facts. Is Italy the last stronghold of the Catholic family in Western Europe? We’ll have to wait until the result of the vote on new prospective legislation currently under discussion, but there are signs that in Italy the LGBT and similar lobbies are having a more difficult time than elsewhere.

There are two major innovative elements in the Cirinnà proposed law (named after the senator Monica Cirinnà who drafted it) that is now going through the Italian Parliament. One is granting official status to both heterosexual and homosexual civil partnerships, making them legally equal to marriages. The other is giving the civil partners in all these unions the right to adopt each other’s offspring, thus opening the door to same-sex couples’ adoption rights.

While the various parties in Parliament are negotiating and fighting over innumerable amendments and counter-amendments to the bill, the latest opinion polls have found that a small majority of Italians (between 50% and 60%, depending on the poll) favor the former but a strong majority (3 out of 4) oppose the latter.

Breakdown by political affiliation shows that the majority of Right-wing respondents oppose official status for civil partnerships as well, although individual Catholic members of Parliament across a broad spectrum of parties from the Right to the Left are also totally against this bill.

It’s interesting to see how in Italy, like in the United States, a public opinion that showed initial resistance to legal recognition of civil unions (or, in the case of the US, to same-sex marriage) has gradually changed over recent years, considering that in 2000 only 42% of Italians accepted it. The effect of mainstream media’s propaganda and the general feeling of fighting a lost battle (being “on the wrong side of history”) combine with changing demographics, as the 78% of supporters among the under-35s clearly indicates.

Italy is still the only country in Western Europe that does not have a law on civil partnerships.

Does this mean that Italy is lagging behind, and that countries like the UK and France are more advanced? This is what I used to think. If I was asked such a question years ago, my answer would have been “yes”.

But now I have different views and I wonder: advanced towards what? Our concept of "progress" entirely depends on the final destination we choose.

I now believe that the nations which introduced laws to give equal status to non-married couples and legalised same-sex marriage have advanced on the road to perdition, the road leading to Hell. Not to mention human unhappiness in this world as well.

Steve Soukup’s argument in the article mentioned above is that, since Italians are condemned (far from uniquely in the Western world) to demographic extinction, it’s pointless for them to worry about granting official status to civil partnerships, same-sex and non, stepchild adoption and similar matters.

This argument has a very strange logic. For it’s exactly by reaffirming the value of the true marriage and family, and therefore by opposing those who wish to equate marriage with other forms of union while at the same time by explaining the need for Christian ethics and natural law, that we can hope for society’s recovery, including demographically.

Furthermore, to say (or imply) that Italy is lagging behind (by expressions like “a half-century too late”), despite its having one of the lowest birth rates, a sure indicator of a “developed” society, just because the country doesn’t easily accept to be dominated and subjected to homophile and sexual relativist ideas, is tantamount to neglecting an objective sociological indicator and paying attention only to a subjective ideological preference of the commentator.

What is very lively in Italy, although largely ignored or vilified by the media, is the large grassroots movement of opinion against the Cirinnà bill and what it represents.

An example of the tactics used by the media to attack this movement is the coverage of the Standing Sentinels. All over Italy, in hundreds of towns and cities, silent protests are being held by the Sentinelle in Piedi to protect the natural family founded on the union between man and woman.

They stand in a square or other public place they have been authorized to use, usually reading.

These peaceful people generally attract the attention of various Left-wing, anarchist, LGBT and other groups, who stage unauthorized counter-demonstrations around them, harassing them with shouts, insults, spits, pushes and all sorts of violence, verbal and physical, to which the Standing Sentinels don’t respond.

The media reports, not unlike those talking about “sectarian violence” between Christians and Muslims in Islamic countries where the former are persecuted, tortured and slaughtered by the latter, describe “conflicts between opposing groups”, one of which, for good measure, is defined as “ultra-Catholic” (whatever that means).

The Family Day is another spontaneous movement of laity that has organised protests. On January 30th a huge pro-family demonstration, dubbed “Family Day”, was held in the Circus Maximus, one of the largest open spaces in Rome, estimated to have been attended by over a million people and said to have been the biggest demo of all time, in a country long used to big demos.

I conclude with what the Family Day spokesman Massimo Gandolfini, a neurosurgeon and psychiatrist, declared:

On these issues I have specialist knowledge. The entire world literature, from Freud to today's studies, says that the harmonious growth of the individual requires the essential presence of the so-called "parental triad" (child, mom and dad). There is no dissenting voice, except some theories from the ‘80s supported by the gay lobby, like the studies of the homosexual researcher Patterson, who recounted the development of some children of same-sex couples through their self-reports. In reality they are not really scientific investigations but opinion surveys carried out by her. There is no scientifically valid study favorable to the adoption of children by gay couples.

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A Tale of Inequality: Sex, Rape, Alcohol, Anonymity

In the UK there is a two-lane system of law: one for women and one for men. And guess which is the faster, broader, more comfortable lane to travel in.

Last August an unnamed (to protect privacy of those involved, all names are withdrawn here) middle-aged top woman lawyer had a business lunch with a male colleague, a senior City lawyer, suggested by her, followed by a "long boozy afternoon" together.

The pair were then seen outside the very busy Waterloo Station, in London, during rush hour, engaged in indecent and intimate behaviour.

They were arrested and spent the night in a cell in a South London police station.

The following morning, the man denied any wrongdoing and was charged with outraging public decency by engaging in a sexual act during broad daylight. The woman, a QC (Queen's Counsel, namely an especially eminent lawyer) and high-profile barrister, accepted a police caution for the same offence as the man.

Six weeks later the QC changed her story, and said that she should never have accepted the caution because she had, in reality, been the victim of a sexual assault. That claim guaranteed her anonymity for life, while the man, as the defendant, has had his name splashed all over the papers.

Media reports say that six weeks later, after returning to the same police officer who gave her the caution, the woman said she was intending to make an application to have the caution quashed, claiming she was unwell at the time of the incident.

Instead of asking her why she didn’t say all this before accepting the caution, the police officer took her statement and contacted the man, who was told he would be arrested if he didn’t go for a voluntary interview about it.

So, after getting totally drunk and having sex, she claimed she had been sexually assaulted so that, as a "victim", her identity would not be disclosed, her reputation would not be trashed and she would not risk jeopardising her brilliant career. A man cannot have that "opportunity" open to him to protect his name.

We have here another of the many absurdities of the victimhood ideology and culture: women, as pre-labelled "victims", have the privilege of getting plastered and claiming they were raped, men don't. But these women can decide to become unconscious through stratospheric alcohol consumption, and they were conscious when they made that decision. Also: why can't the same thing be said of a man? That a woman sexually assaulted him because he was too drunk to be able to give consent?

Why should a man not be allowed to sue a woman because she had sex with him when he was too drunk to give consent? Reflexes are not a sign of voluntary reaction.

Violence is not claimed to have occurred in these cases of alleged "rape" when the woman was under the influence, because obviously violence was not necessary. So, if there was no resistance, the disparity in physical strength between the sexes - which is anyway general but not universal, true in most cases but not in all - cannot be adduced as an excuse for such unequal treatment of men and women.

To prevent these travesties of justice from happening, the law should be changed so that either both accuser and defendant in sexual crime cases are protected by anonymity or neither is.

Similarly, either both men and women can use being drunk while having sex as grounds for a rape claim or neither can.

Lord Bramall Is Innocent, Like So Many Others

Tatchell and Dawkins are opposing an ideological enemy, not paedophilia

Lord Bramall, a UK former armed forces chief dubbed a "war hero", has launched a serious attack against London's Metropolitan Police Service (Met for short, aka Scotland Yard) for "failing to speak to witnesses who cast doubt on the claims made 10 months earlier by an alleged abuse victim called Nick".

Almost a year ago the 92-year-old was accused by a single witness, a man in his 40s known as "Nick", who alleged that he had been abused as a boy by a powerful "VIP paedophile ring" (as it came to be called), which included Lord Bramall, former (and late) UK prime minister Ted Heath and the late former Tory MP Harvey Proctor. Among the accusations was that he had raped and tortured young boys in the 1970s.

Bramall was immediately subjected to a heavy-handed police investigation which included a 10-hour raid on his home in Surrey, in the south-east of England. Among other things, Lord Bramall aims to challenge the legality of the search warrant on his property, questioning if the police followed the letter of the law in obtaining the warrant.

The former army chief has always denied the allegations, saying: "I know I have only had sex with someone other than my own sex" and calling any suggestion he was involved in child abuse "absolutely a load of rubbish."

The D-Day veteran criticised a senior police officer named Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald for having appealed for boys who might have been abused to come forward, adding that, if people who had been abused came forward, "we will believe you". Lord Bramall correctly commented that it was not the police's role to accept allegations as true, but the prosecutors' task to prove them.

"We will believe you" seems to me a remark more suitable to a counsellor or psychotherapist than to a policeman. Empathy is required from the former, investigation from the latter. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
The claims against Lord Bramall were part of "Nick"'s allegations, under investigation by the Met, of having been abused by prominent men in the military, politics and law enforcement.

Despite what Det Supt McDonald said, that the police regarded the allegations as "credible and true", Bramall has recently been told that he faces no further action as "following a thorough investigation officers have concluded there is insufficient evidence to charge him with any offence.

Yesterday the ex-director of public prosecutions Lord Kenneth Macdonald (not to be confused with the officer MacDonald quoted above) criticised the new police stance of “we believe the victim”, adding that it could lead to miscarriages of justice and that police had got the balance wrong. He said officers risked being “manipulated by fantasists”.

In an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme he commented: “The worst miscarriages of justice I have seen have resulted from blinkered investigations in which police have believed a theory at the start of the case and gone on to try to prove that theory. We need the police to conduct impartial, objective and professional investigations.”

This is at the end of about a year in which the peer had to live under suspicion of one the most despised crimes. Isn't a man whose reputation has been damaged a victim too? Quite unprecedented, even the Queen expressed her support for the ex army-chief.

The investigating detectives failed their duty when they did not interview key witnesses for 11 months and did not check some of the case's most basic facts for over 5 months.

A lot can be said about this, which is unfortunately similar to many other cases.

But I want to trace it back to where it all started on a big scale: this modern form of persecution dates back to the time when the mostly Left-wing mainstream media had a field day with the so-called "Catholic Church abuse scandal".

Just to see how politically self-serving in order to settle old scores with ideological enemies the furore was, and how absolutely nothing this fake self-righteousness had to do with concern about children, one has to observe the total silence and absence of outrage at the allegations of abuse by politicians and entertainment industry members (or anybody unconnected with the Church) of those professional anti-Christians like Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell who so vociferously, venomously and unjustifiably called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI when he visited Britain in 2010 (see picture above).

For some reason, sexual offences have such a powerful emotional impact that, unlike criminal claims of other nature (like robbery or embezzlement), whenever accusations of sexual misconduct are made there is a presumption of guilt, when in fact there should always be - both legally and morally - a presumption of innocence until proof of guilt is provided.
The onus of the proof is on the accuser.

From the mere claim of an accuser (who may have all kinds of motivations and personal problems) to the evidence of guilt there is a vast distance, similar to that between saying and doing, speculating and demonstrating, fantasy and reality.

The so-called "sex abuse scandal" of the Church has been largely a political campaign by the mainstream media, whose journalists are mostly on the far-Left, anti-clerical and atheists with a vengeance. There were plenty of episodes of false and misleading headlines which were plainly contradicted by the article below, if anyone bothered to read it.

The fact that the Church in many cases chose out-of-court settlements was seen as an admission of guilt instead of, as it should have been seen, as a sign of the Church's desire not to be dragged into a shameful headline war by a hostile media establishment, which thrived on court cases.

Since then, some people have realised that making allegations of sexual abuse (no matter how well or, rather, badly founded) was a way to win money infinitely more reliable than by buying a lottery ticket.

And so the ball of paedophilia or rape charges against men in the public sphere, preferably rich and famous, has kept rolling.

The historic abuse charges are the best because, in the absence of physical evidence after decades, mere acquaintance with a celebrity or politician may be enough to jump on the bandwagon, or even better the gravy train.


By www.CGPGrey.com, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11534384

The Amorality of Atheism, Great Book

The Amorality of Atheism (Amazon USA)  (Amazon UK)  by Giorgio Roversi, an Italian author living in Britain, is a slim book that says everything that needs to be said.

Atheism is full of illogicalities both from an ethical and scientific viewpoint.

This book deals with the ethical aspect of atheism's self-contradictions, and it does it brilliantly.

The only consistency of atheist "morality" or rather of atheism in general is with the requirements of a society that simply wants to follow its own wishes and urges without any constraints.

But this is also a society which was founded on Christianity, therefore the remnants of the ethical system that has dominated it for almost two millennia still echo in the hollow chamber of even the most entrenched atheists.

And here is the origin of another contradiction: modern secularists want their cake and eat it. They don't want an external source of their morality so they can forge it the way they like it, but at the same time they want to feel to be self-righteous and doing "the right thing". So they claim that those qualities and acts that we consider good only in virtue of their adherence to the Christian values can find their grounds on something else. But what?

The options offered are all wanting.

Science. One of the most irrational claims of many atheists is that science can guide morality. Hume's principle is here an invincible obstacle: you cannot derive "ought" from "is".

Subjectivity. But that, as Roversi says, is the opposite of morality, which must by its own very nature be universal and therefore objective.

"Nice, good" feelings, like empathy and compassion. But we also have nasty, bad feelings, destructive and harmful to others. If we are only a conglomerate of atoms and cells bent solely towards survival and self-interest, on what rational - not emotional - grounds can we choose which are better between those two competing groups of feelings?

This book should be read by everyone because the subject it deals with concerns all of us in the most fundamental and vital way. A society cannot survive without ethics and, therefore, without God.

The West is trying on itself an experiment that is bound to fail and is already failing, as we can see, for example, from the devastation of the family, the race towards primitivism, the erosion of civilisation and all their consequences, like multiculturalism, destructive immigration and the growing power of Islam.

Giorgio Roversi's The Amorality of Atheism is the antidote to the poisonous misconceptions and deceptions spread by Hollywood, the mass media and the elites (political and intellectual) every minute of every day.

This book is very highly recommended.

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Innocent Priest Wrongly Accused of Sex Abuse Sues His False Accusers

Christians forgive, don't fight back, don't retaliate. In this world, in short, they are easy victims, be it of Isis and other violent Muslims in Asia and Africa or of people who try to milk the Church by way of false accusations in our part of the world.

But at least one priest is pushing back.

Xiu Hui "Joseph" Jiang, a 31-year-old Chinese priest who had faced religious persecution in China for his faith, went to America and experienced something similar, albeit presented in a different way.

Not once but twice the St. Louis priest was falsely accused and cleared. He says that the police officers who arrested him didn't investigate the claims, otherwise they wouldn't have arrested him.

In the first case, involving a girl, Judge Chris Kunza Mennemeyer dismissed the charge of "child endangerment" in November 2013 because Father Jiang had never been alone with the alleged victim, so it was impossible for him to perpetrate the sex abuse of which he had been wildly accused.

In the second case, in April 2014 prosecutors charged Fr. Jiang with two felony counts of first-degree statutory sodomy involving a boy younger than 14.

The archdiocese [of St. Louis] said in a statement issued Friday that the new allegation was reported through the Missouri Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline by a family who over the past year has been pursuing a claim against the archdiocese related to their child being bullied by other students.

“The family had never claimed that their child was abused by a priest until this week,” the statement said. “Fr. Jiang voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the request of police pending a decision whether charges are going to be brought.”

At the time the archdiocese of St. Louis released this statement:

“During the investigation into the veracity of the abuse allegation, Fr. Joseph Jiang agreed to undergo an independent polygraph examination. According to the report released, the examiners concluded that Fr. Jiang responded truthfully in his steadfast denials of sexual abuse of a minor at any point in his life, both during his interview and polygraph examination.”

Last month prosecutors decided to dismiss the charges, quite likely for lack of any evidence to support them.

Now Father Jiang has resolved that enough is enough and, in a first, he has filed a federal lawsuit against his accusers, members of the St. Louis police department for publicly accusing him of being a child molester and two leaders of the group SNAP, who launched a smear campaign against him through the media.

From The Media Report:

In both 2012 and 2014, Rev. Jiang was publicly accused of abuse charges which received wide media attention with SNAP breathlessly claiming that Jiang was a dangerous child molester on the prowl. Yet even at a glance the accusations against Jiang were clearly bogus.

In his lawsuit, Fr. Jiang sets forth a litany of facts which demonstrate just how crazy one accuser's claims were from the start:
◾The accuser's fourth-grade teacher has stated that it was "virtually impossible" that Fr. Jiang pulled the accuser "out of line" at school and abused him as claimed;
◾"The alleged victim had made previous unfounded allegations of sexual abuse";
◾"[The accuser's] fourth-grade teacher indicated that [the accuser] was a serial exaggerator to the point of being 'delusional'";
◾"[The accuser's] parents had a history of making unfounded claims against the Catholic Church for monetary gain";
◾"[The accuser] has never had any personal acquaintance with Fr. Joseph, and he could not identify Fr. Joseph's name when he made the allegation";
◾"[A parent of the accuser once] physically assaulted the principal of [a Catholic school] by choking him or her";
◾"The accusations were brought by a deeply troubled and unreliable 12-year-old boy at the suggestion of his abusive father."

SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) is a controversial association. Reading its material, you find plenty of cases in which a mere accusation, unsupported or not established to be true, against a Catholic priest is treated as an irrefutable proof of guilt. They don't seem to go by the rule "innocent until proven guilty" but on the contrary "guilty until proven innocent (and even after that)".

Based in St Louis, SNAP refers clients to law firms that have pried no less than 2 billion dollars from the US Catholic Church in settlements and judgements between 1992 and 2010, some of which the law firms return to SNAP in donations. A SNAP director had a salary of $90,000 a few years ago.

The two leaders of SNAP who fiercely attacked Father Jiang in the media are Barbara Dorris and David Clohessy. The latter says that he had repressed his memories of abuse at the hands of a priest.

Indeed, many of the claims against Catholic clergy have been based on "repressed and then recovered memories", although the theory behind them is not accepted by the consensus of scientific psychology, despite being the basis of widespread beliefs and practices of lots of "therapists" in a field which is unregulated and where rarely a professional is accountable for his actions and malpractice, unlike other professionals like doctors.

Memory simply doesn't work like that. Memory is not the faithful taperecorder or mirror of events that most of us believe it to be: it's much more "creative" than that.

World expert on memory, Professor Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, for 30 years has been performing experiments showing that any memory can be easily implanted, making people "remember" with certainty something that never happened.

Many lies have been told especially by the media about the Catholic Church mostly invented sex abuse scandal. The "repressed memories syndrome" is one aspect of that false scenario.

Church Burning and Jewish Settlers in Israel

Published on The Occidental Observer

by Enza Ferreri


Israel’s unfair treatment of Christians continues. At the end of June, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) arrested Greek Orthodox Bishop Atallah Hanna during his peaceful participation in a march protesting the illegal seizure and subsequent sale of Beit al-Baraka hospital, which is part of al-Baraka church, north of Hebron.

A month ago Palestine News Network reported:

A delegation from the Presbyterian church as well as international and Israeli activists participated in the march against the sale of Beit al-Baraka, a hospital which provided medical services to Palestinians as part of al-Baraka church services. The sale is illegal under international and canonical law…

Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month leaked details of the seizure of Beit al-Baraka hospital by a Jewish billionaire, the sale having been allegedly made through a fake Norwegian real estate company. Days after publication of this illegal seizure, the sale process halted, however Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, subsequently decided that there was no legal impediment to the sale of the building.

The previous week saw one of the most serious episodes of violence in recent memory against Christians in Israel.

Five teams of firefighters were necessary to put out the flames which at dawn woke up Tabgha, the area on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in northern Israel, where Jesus fed the 5,000 with the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Mark 6:30-46) and where Jesus appeared for the fourth time after his resurrection following his Crucifixion (John 21:1-24).

A fire broke out at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, built on the site of the miracle, in the middle of the night, “causing extensive damage to the inside and outside of the building, said Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.” A monk and a church volunteer were hospitalised from smoke inhalation.

A spokesman for the fire brigade said that the blaze broke out in several places inside the limestone church, evidence that it was started deliberately.

Hebrew graffiti had been spray-painted in red on a wall outside the church, reading "False gods will be destroyed”, a passage from the Aleinu Leshabeach, a prayer recited by practising Jews at the end of each of the three daily services, suggesting that Jewish zealots were responsible.

So much for the much-vaunted "Judaeo-Christian tradition". These Israeli Jews didn't get the memo.

Police briefly detained 16 young Jewish settlers, all religious Jewish seminary students visiting the Sea of Galilee area from settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They were freed within hours. Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that 10 of those detained were from Yitzhar, which is known as a bastion of extremists and where some residents have been involved in previous hate crimes.

The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish is one of the Holy Land’s most famous Catholic churches and one of the places most visited by pilgrims to the Holy Land, with more than 5,000 people visiting it daily. The church had to be closed for a few days due to the fire damage.

Nahum Weisfish, a Jerusalem rabbi, said the site might have been targeted because it housed a synagogue some 2,000 years ago.

The site is owned by the German Roman Catholic Church, and Berlin's envoy to Israel Andreas Michaelis said he was "shocked" by the incident, adding: "Religious institutions must be as well protected in Israel as they are in Germany and Europe."

That’s exactly the point. If Israel wants to be considered as a Western democracy, it’s no good to argue that Christians in the Jewish state are not butchered and tortured with the degree of barbarity we find in Muslim countries and Muslim-controlled areas. The difference pointed out between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations is true, but the right object of comparison for a country which claims to be part of the West should be Western democracies.

Zionists have to stress how concerned they are about the fate of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of murderous Muslims to keep the Evangelicals supporting their cause. That doesn't stop Israel from secretly helping the worst murderers of Christians: ISIS.

Tabgha had been subjected to a previous attack in April 2014. Father Matthias Karl, a German monk at the church, explained that a group of religious Jewish teenagers had pelted worshippers with stones, destroyed a cross and threw benches into the lake.

In April, vandals smashed gravestones at a Maronite Christian cemetery near Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

In recent years, many mosques and churches have been vandalised in both Israel and the West Bank.

The attacks are often attributed to extremist Jews, particularly from West Bank settlements, but, despite condemnations and promises of crackdown on religiously-inspired hate crime by Israeli politicians, few have been convicted.

The Rabbis for Human Rights group says there have been 43 hate crime attacks on churches, mosques and monasteries in Israel and the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2009.

Many of these are so-called "price-tag" attacks, carried out against Israeli security forces as well as Palestinian property, both Muslim and Christian, in reprisal for Israeli government’s action against the Jewish illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The name indicates that these attacks are the price to pay for anti-settlement activity.

The US State Department's 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism included price-tag attacks for the first time. It says: “In August, the Beit Jamal Monastery near Jerusalem was firebombed and spray-painted with the words “death to the Gentiles” and other slogans.”

It quotes UN figures of “399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage.” It adds that such attacks were “largely unprosecuted according to UN and NGO sources.”

Whenever there is mention of the UN, Zionists reject wholesale every one of its pronouncements or reports because it is "pro-Palestinian". The implication is that it is biased. They often argue that all Muslim countries, through the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), vote as a bloc in the UN, thus skewing the vote results in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel. OIC is a 57-member state organisation representing 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. As the largest Islamic organization in the world, it is quite powerful and the largest voting bloc in the UN.

Could it be that the UN is "pro-Palestinian" because of the right of return that Israel denies that people or the 3/4 of a million illegal settlers in Israel’s occupied territories?

Israel’s Joint Arab List party alliance, in the wake of the latest attack, that against the Church of the Multiplication, called for the immediate dismissal of Israel's police chief, Yohanan Danino, and for Right-wing extremist groups to be declared terrorist organisations. It also accused the government of doing nothing to control extremist Right-wing organisations:

"Netanyahu stands at the head of the incitement system against the Arab public in Israel, and he is guilty of the revenge attacks we witness in the morning news," the party stated. "A so-called price-tag attack is not an act by deviants, but rather an act by calculated, thinking people that are indicative of the existence and repercussions of institutionalized racism and oppression."

Prime Minister Netanyahu has used strong words against the recent unknown vandals, but it’s impossible not to notice that the perpetrators of this kind of crime have almost never been identified, captured and put on trial. Isn’t it a bit strange, in a country which has an impressive and efficient security and police apparatus?

In 2014, just before Pope Francis’ visit to Israel, in Jerusalem both the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Notre Dame Center, the large Christian complex just outside the Old City, were covered with offensive graffiti. Before that, the Franciscan Church near the Last Supper Room, the Dormition Abbey and a nearby Christian cemetery were attacked. In 2012, using methods similar to those employed in Tabghah, the Latrun Trappist Monastery had been attacked. People tried and sentenced? Nil.

With all the best will in the world, it’s a bit hard to see Netanyahu as someone who doggedly pursues Jewish vandals coming from the settlements. That’s because Netanyahu is and has always been the settlements’ number one supporter. When Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza in 2004, Netanyahu left his government in protest. In the last twenty years the surface occupied by Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has grown by over 180%, and for at least half of this time Netanyahu has been Prime Minister.

The last act of the previous Netanyahu government, the one that led to the disintegration of the government and early elections, was its approval of the law that defines Israel as the "state of the Jewish nation", potentially discriminating against ethnic and religious minorities.

In short, all of Netanyahu’s political action has been in favour of the settlements policy. He has drawn a growing political support from it. The reality is that today the settlers are those who dictate the political trend in Israel. Their interests influence the agenda of governments. The intransigence of those who hold the front line, even risking their lives, is to be respected. The rest, including arsons, is just a consequence.

Cell Vesicles Coats and Irreducible Complexity

Living cells contain vesicles, sacs that transport water and substances like proteins and lipids among different compartments of the cell, including between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the Golgi apparatus, or between the outside and the interior of the cell.

The formation of such trafficking vesicles is among the most fundamental processes taking place in the cell.

A team of scientists of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg has produced - using low-temperature cryo-electron tomography - the most detailed pictures ever obtained of the coats surrounding transport vesicles, images that have revealed a thus-far unimagined complexity.

This is the first time that a model of a complete assembled vesicle coat has been realised. The study, published in Science earlier this month, contradicts the current “adaptor-and-cage” view of coated vesicle formation.

The way these highly interconnected coats, made of proteins, function has been compared to a self-driving car which, when you walk out of your front door, assembles around you, rises from the ground, takes you to your destination levitating in the air, then disassembles, ready to pick up another passenger. Something very similar does happen in biological cells.

Progress in science constantly shows that life is much more intricated, sophisticated and complex than we suppose.

There are three types of known transport vesicles, each with its specific type of coat which is composed of different proteins and assembles onto a membrane surrounding the vesicle: Clathrin-coated vesicle (CCV), Coat Protein 1 (COPI), Coat Protein 2 (COPII).

While it was believed that the assembled COPI coat was similar to Clathrin and COPII, it was found instead that it is more complicated, having seven proteins coming together simultaneously and forming complexes with triangular symmetry that allow the complex to attach to the vesicle membrane. The "triads" forming the coat are called "coatomers":

[A]ssembled coatomer can adopt different conformations to interact with different numbers of neighbors. By regulating the relative frequencies of different triad patterns in the COPI coat during assembly -- for example, by stabilizing particular coatomer conformations -- the cell would have a mechanism to adapt vesicle size and shape to cargoes of different sizes.[Emphasis added]

Evolution News website comments:

The complexity of these coats, and the accessory proteins that build them, attach them to vesicles and disassemble them, defy unguided evolutionary explanations. They exhibit irreducible complexity; they don't work unless all the protein parts are present simultaneously.

An irreducibly complex mechanism is such that it cannot work unless all its components are present at the same time.

Many machines exhibit this property. But so do many biological mechanisms and organs.

University of Illinois biologist Tom Frazzetta, in his 1975 classic Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , wrote:

When modifying the design of a machine, an engineer is not bound by the need to maintain a real continuity between the first machine and the next modification .. But in evolution, transitions from one type to the next presumably involve a greater continuity by means of a vast number of intermediate types. Not only must the end product - the final machine - be feasible, but so must be all the intermediates. The evolutionary problem is, in a real sense, the gradual improvement of a machine while it is running.

Frazzetta, an expert in functional biomechanics (the study of how animals work) had for many years studied and dissected the skulls of the bolyerine snakes, rare snakes of the Island of Mauritius. These animals, similar to boas, have a unique anatomical specialisation: their upper jaw is made up of two segments joined together and requiring many specialised tendons, bones, ligaments, muscles, nerves and other tissues.

This characteristic allows the bolyerine snakes to bend the front half of their divided upper jaw backwards when attacking a prey, resulting in a wider opening of the mouth.

How could this system of interconnected tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones and nerves have evolved gradually, as neo-Darwinism contends? It's an all-or-nothing situation.

No intermediate condition could have worked and consented the viability of this species.

As evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould put it in "The Return of Hopeful Monsters": “How can a jawbone be half broken?”

After Chattanooga, Franklin Graham Says: "Shut Borders to Muslims"

On 16 July 2015 Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a Muslim man, opened fire at two different military centres six miles apart (the first a military recruitment station and the second a Navy and Marines reserve facility) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, wounding two service members and a police officer and killing four other service members immediately. One of the wounded servicemen died from his injuries two days later. The gunman was killed by police at the site of the second shooting.

The killer was a 24-year-old Muslim immigrant from Kuwait granted US citizenship, a college graduate with a degree in electrical engineering.

The authorities' head scratching in search of a motive for the killing is slightly ridiculous, if the situation were not tragic.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez is dead now but has left vital clues in a blog he ran on his Islamic beliefs. The blog has only two posts, both posted just three days before his horrific crime. The Daily Mail reports:

The first post was entitled 'A Prison Called Dunya,' Abdulazeez refers to prisoner who is told he would be given a test that would either take him out of his earthly prison - or send him into a more restrictive environment.

According to the website [The Daily Beast], he wrote: 'I would imagine that any sane person would devote their time to mastering the information on the study guide and stay patient with their studies, only giving time for the other things around to keep themselves focused on passing the exam.

He added: 'This life is that test, designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire.'

The second post is called 'Understanding Islam: The Story of the Three Blind Men.' It suggests Abdulazeez felt his fellow Muslims had a 'certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is.

He also wrote:

Brothers and sisters don't be fooled by your desires, this life is short and bitter and the opportunity to submit to Allah may pass you by.

As measures of terrorism prevention, six different governors of US states have authorised their respective National Guard soldiers to be armed for both deterrence and self-protection, while the Pentagon recommends "closing the blinds" ("that won't stop bullets, but may help cut down on the air conditioning bill", is The Examiner's sarcastic comment) and other "new security measures" such as increased surveillance.

These are not real, effective preventative measures, and nobody genuinely believes they are.

Much more sense makes what the American evangelist Franklin Graham proposed on his Facebook page, namely completely closing the US borders to Islam:

Four innocent Marines (United States Marine Corps) killed and three others wounded in ‪#‎Chattanooga‬ yesterday including a policeman and another Marine--all by a radical Muslim whose family was allowed to immigrate to this country from Kuwait. We are under attack by Muslims at home and abroad. We should stop all immigration of Muslims to the U.S. until this threat with Islam has been settled. Every Muslim that comes into this country has the potential to be radicalized--and they do their killing to honor their religion and Muhammad. During World War 2, we didn't allow Japanese to immigrate to America, nor did we allow Germans. Why are we allowing Muslims now? Do you agree? Let your Congressman know that we've got to put a stop to this and close the flood gates. Pray for the men and women who serve this nation in uniform, that God would protect them.

Islam divides the world into two parts: Dar al-Islam (Arabic for "house of Islam") and Dar al-Harb (in Arabic, "house of war"). The latter is the whole part of the world where Islam has not yet triumphed and Islamic law is not in force. For Islam, there must be war initiated by Muslims against all those peoples and in all those countries who have not yet submitted to Islam until they have done so.

What about all those peaceful and law-abiding Muslims living in the West? They cannot do anything to stop their extreme co-religionists, who not only are more determined but also have the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence on their side.

As Theodore Dalrymple put it, a minority can have much more power than a majority, on which it can exercise tyranny:

[A] handful of fanatics can easily have a much more significant social effect than a large number of peaceful citizens. There is more to fear in one terrorist than to celebrate in 99 well-integrated immigrants.

Yes, and there are many more reasons to stop Muslim immigration than to allow it.

Organ-on-a-Chip Breakthrough to Replace Lab Animals

Researchers are developing miniature models of human organs on plastic chips, which will replace lab animals. Big pharmaceutical companies have started using these in vitro systems in drug development.

The science journal Nature reported that earlier this month at the Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, Big Pharma showed great and immediate interest in the latest advances in miniature model organs exhibited there that respond to drugs and diseases in the same way as do human organs such as the heart and liver:

“We’re surprised at how rapidly the technology has come along,” says Dashyant Dhanak, global head of discovery sciences at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, which announced last month that it would use a thrombosis-on-chip model from Massachusetts biotechnology firm Emulate to test whether experimental and already approved drugs could cause blood clots.

As New Scientist explains:

With the help of a 3D printer mini human organs can come in all shapes and sizes. In this video, a cluster of tiny hearts – shown on the right – beat in sync, and another pulsing heart is fused with a spherical, darker-coloured liver.

Developed by Anthony Atala and his team at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the mini-organs represent the first step in developing an entire human body on a chip.

The hearts were created by reprogramming human skin cells into heart cells, which were then clumped together in a cell culture. A 3D printer was then used to give them the desired shape and size – in this case, a diameter of 0.25 millimetres.

Organs-on-chips are more realistic – and more reliable for drug discovery and testing – models of the human body than both human cell cultures and the very expensive lab animals, that belonging to other species frequently give dangerously misleading results.

Although any new drug must first be tested in healthy humans for safety, says James Hickman, a bioengineer at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, using an in vitro organ might help to eliminate or shorten this step.

The chips could also help companies to pinpoint the dose of a drug that is both effective and safe, says Matthew Wagoner, a drug-safety scientist at AstraZeneca in Waltham, Massachusetts. If regulators accept such data, the method might eventually allow companies to skip the portion of a clinical trial that tests a wide range of drug doses on patients.

The scaled-down organs mimic the function of the real life-size organs. The next step, in order to reproduce the complexity of a human body, is to integrate these different model organs and systems together and reproduce a whole organ system, to test new treatments and drugs or examine the effects of chemicals and viruses.

[M]any pharmaceutical companies say that organs-on-chips are now sufficiently advanced to justify investment in their use and refinement. “We think it’s important to be involved,” says Michelle Browner, senior director of platform innovation at Johnson & Johnson. Only that way can the technology be developed in line with what the company needs, she says.

Government regulators are also participating. In autumn the US National Center on Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will organise a meeting of drug companies, scientists and regulators on the Organ-on-a-Chip’s use. And NCATS is financing 11 research teams, each of which working on a different organ or system that, when developed, will be connected to form a whole ‘body-on-a-chip’.

UK Minimum Wage Rise Will Hurt the Poorest

The UK government has just increased the national minimum wage, as part of the new Budget.

The idea that governments can change the way markets operate is entirely illusory.

With this rise in what has been re-branded as the "National Living Wage", what will happen?

If a worker A's skills don't have enough value for an employer B to pay A the minimum wage the government forces him to pay, B will not hire A. And this outcome will be repeated with many other employers, so A - who might have been recruited before this restrictive measure was introduced - will end up unemployed.

Raising the minimum wage means that the competition for jobs will be harder, and all those job-seekers who were barely employable at the previous wages but don't possess the qualities that justify the higher cost now required for their work will simply be left out of the economy without any prospect for employment.

Another consequence of the new minimum wage will be that employers and companies of all kinds will pass on the increased expenditure for their workforce to their customers by increasing their prices.

In the end, this will make the cost of living higher, which results in the reduction of real income, including wages and salaries.

What will be clear once again is that the market cannot be forced into a straitjacket.

The right way for a worker or job seeker to get a higher salary is different. He should make himself more valuable, more worthy of being hired at a greater cost for his employer by studying hard, getting sought-after skills, refining his talents and working hard. In short, by making himself useful to his boss or company to such a point that his use compensates for or is even greater than his cost.

This is a real, genuine, economically sound method to increment wages, one that applies and plays along the laws of economics rather than trying to fight them and go against them.

A government's diktat, instead, is an artificial method, and as such it backfires.

There are no shortcuts in the economy, no free lunch in business.

Countries with command economies learnt this lesson the hardest way, by impoverishing themselves and their peoples. But even in the so-called capitalist, or free-market economies, when governments succumb to the temptation to meddle with the marketplace, they practically introduce small elements of socialism, which unbalance the market and cause grave damage to the very people they pretend to help.

Is Using Food Banks a Sign of Real Poverty?

Food banks are very much in the news in Britain, with figures showing that over one million people in the country are using them, while organisations and campaigners ask for more funds for the purpose.

To cater for the persons using them, lots of food banks are all over the UK, run by churches and voluntary groups, providing food for people who are said to struggle to make ends meet.

After all the indigestion (pun unintended) of talk about food banks during the last campaign for the election of the UK Parliament in May, I wished to find out more about these monsters, the symbol of Conservative "austerity" policy.

I may seem unkind, but my prediction was that food banks would be frequented by fat people who wanted to save their money to spend it on fags and booze, and sometimes drugs.

After all, the food problem that most people - and especially those belonging to lower social classes - have is a problem of eating too much, not too little.

Wasn't I right!

Most photos of food banks only show those who work for them and not the people who use them, and the reason for this is that, when you do see the food bank clients, many look clearly fat, and even obese.

Ah, but that demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that they are poor, as fatness and obesity are, in our society, the hallmark of poverty.

Columnist Brendan O'Neill wrote a rather scathing article on the subject some time ago, that created controversy. Entitled "What's fuelling the food-bank frenzy? The hunger for publicity of anti-poverty activists", it started:

Something about the food-bank frenzy doesn't add up. Reading the Dickens-tinged coverage of food banks, of which there are now 400, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain has done a timewarp back to the Victorian era of emaciated urchins begging for scraps of bread on foggy bridges. Britons are "hungrier than ever", says the Independent. "Starving Britain", says one newspaper headline. There is clearly enormous "destitution, hardship and hunger" in Britain, says Oxfam. Even the International Red Cross has got involved, promising to help tackle Britain's "food poverty". What next – a charity single along the lines of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", only aimed at getting emergency food to allegedly starving Brits rather than actually starving Africans?

We're going back in time to Dickens and in space to starving Africa. But we still have an obesity crisis, especially among the "poor".

What kind of poor can they be, if they have too much food? Enter the "new poor", who have too much rather than too little.

Yes, goes the answer, but it's not quantity but quality that makes poverty these days. So, the "poor" eat the wrong stuff.

Why not open "healthy food banks", then? That's an idea. For, you see, it's difficult to believe that large numbers of people in Britain are actually starving because unable to spare 25p (pence, pennies) for a can of baked beans and 40p for a loaf of sliced bread from Tesco or other supermarket chains.

In fact for a long time the complaint has been that food was too cheap. Food poverty = inability to have a healthy diet.

The problem here, which creates so much confusion, is semantic: the word "poverty" has been redefined for ideological and political reasons and that makes the term almost useless, at least in the affluent Western world.

The real meaning of the word "poverty", in the genuine sense of not having what one objectively needs, has now been restricted to the expression "absolute poverty", while "relative poverty" is what is applied to people who generally are not poor at all, but are poor only compared to the society's average. Therefore, if they live in a rich society, it simply means that they are not as wealthy as they would like to be, not enough to "keep up with the Joneses".