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".

Worst Ever Migrant Crisis as 10 Million British Holidaymakers Head for Calais

Published on The Latest News

by Enza Ferreri


It won’t surprise people who have long been aware that unregulated, unrestricted immigration from the Third World to Western countries, far from being the much-trumpeted solution to global poverty or – according to what source you’re hearing – the panacea for rich, ageing countries in need of new workforce, is in fact the recipe for cultural and social chaos.

UK newspapers are announcing that British holidaymakers must prepare for the “worst ever Calais migrant crisis” this summer, and that one Calais immigrant every three minutes is caught trying to sneak into Britain illegally.

While police reported a spike in the number of illegal immigrants found in the UK in the wake of the Calais crisis, it’s been discovered that migrants evade “100 per cent” of government's security checks on lorries at the UK border.

I don’t want to dazzle you with statistics and superlatives, but there’s more to come: the illegal immigrants caught at the UK border more than doubled last year; 11,300 stowaways were captured in France in a three-week period from June 21; during June and the first week of July Kent Police found 405 illegal immigrants who had reached the UK hiding in vehicles or trains (81 a week on average), compared with just 26 (one a week) during the first five months of this year; 35,000 illegal immigrants were discovered trying to breach security measures at Calais to reach Britain in the last six months; the UK government’s existing security budget for the Calais migrant crisis is £12 million, on top of which a new secure zone in the port, announced yesterday by Theresa May, will cost £1.4 million; over a three-week period during French ferry workers’ strikes, numbers rocketed to at least 540 a day (23 an hour) attempting to break through fences or stow away in lorries.
Finally, the chief constable of Kent warned there has been an 80-fold increase in the number of illegal immigrants actually reaching British soil, adding that the French government should put more resources on the ground: if not the police, then the military.

It’s not an excessive request. Richard Burnett, head of the Road Haulage Association, said that British lorry drivers face “civil war” conditions as they try to pass through Calais.

20-strong gangs of migrants are threatening drivers with bars and knives, and in one case with a gun. The French ferry workers’ strike caused miles-long queues, giving migrants opportunities to break into the stationary lorries trapped in the endless queues. And dock workers have threatened further industrial action over the summer.

There are now 5,000 migrants who have set up camp near the port in Calais, up from 3,000 last month and around 600 at the beginning of the year. That increase is continuing apace.

As if this were not enough, the school holidays start this weekend, and 10 million British people heading for Europe will go through the port of Calais. The Foreign Office has warned holidaymakers to “keep vehicle doors locked in slow moving traffic and secure your vehicle when unattended”.

Eurotunnel fears migrants could now start targeting ordinary vehicles as well. And the slower the traffic, the more opportunity for migrants to jump on to vehicles. It’s already happened that car owners found illegal immigrants hidden in their vehicles.

Meanwhile, the British government unrealistically tried to reassure the public that chaotic scenes in Calais would not lead to a flood of illegal immigrants on this side of the Channel.

Is that likely? Illegal immigrants have found an easy way to get in and, even if arrested, they can claim asylum and remain in the UK indefinitely.

Home Secretary Theresa May promised the creation of a new migrant-exclusion zone at the port of Calais for UK-bound lorries, providing a secure waiting area for 230 vehicles, “removing them from the open road where they can become targets for migrants attempting to board their vehicles."

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, for once was right when he warned that this measure was “not going to solve the problem” because hundreds more migrants are arriving at Calais every week. He said: “The migrants do not see a fence and say, ‘Oh, here is a fence’. They try to get into the vehicles before they get into the fenced area. The problem is just moved somewhere else.”

John Keefe of Eurotunnel commented: “We have never seen numbers like this before and we have not in the past seen the degree of organisation that goes with the numbers either. It is an absolutely unprecedented situation in international transport.” He raised doubts about the potential impact of the announcement of a new secure area, saying: "As soon as you remove one opportunity, the organised criminals managing the migrant attacks are moving to the next weak spot."

He added that many of those arrested were repeat offenders, as French police release them after each arrest, so it’s regularly the same people coming back again and again and again, sometimes several times in a night. It’s the 5,000 population simply rotating around.

It’s not just a question of numbers, though. Who are these illegal immigrants whose very first act in coming to Britain is the perpetration of a crime? What kind of people are going to live among us, in our streets?

If we look at those who are smuggled on boats across the Mediterranean into Italy, from where they travel all over Europe, we see the Muslim migrants who in April threw 12 Christians overboard to their deaths because, when asking God for help when their dinghy suffered a puncture, these Christians refused to pray to Allah.

Among the migrants are the terrorists and militants that the Islamic State controlling the Libyan coast on the other side of the Mediterranean smuggles into Europe.

And, judging from the behaviour of three Sudanese men who arrived at a Holiday Inn hotel in Flore, Northants, on Wednesday asking to claim asylum, they don’t appear to be very bright either.

While police talk about more personnel, sniffer dog teams, extra fences, Steven Woolfe, UKIP's migration spokesman, said in response to the Home Secretary’s statement in the House of Commons: “At last the government seems to be waking up to the crisis in the Port of Calais that is affecting not only food imports into the UK but also major road arteries in Kent and beyond.”

But, he continued:

“the government needs to negotiate with the French authorities a scheme to ensure the immediate return of illegals to France when they are found on UK Lorries coming from there once in the UK. This one prioritised step will send the word out to those waiting to make their attempts in Jungle camps in Calais that even if you make it to the UK your illegal efforts will not be rewarded. In addition the UK government should not accept any political asylum cases of those who illegally enter the UK from Calais as those cases should have been dealt with in France or in the first European country in which they landed.

“The people of the UK want timely action not mere words. The Home Secretary has taken far too long to recognise this worsening crisis in one of the most important entry points to the UK and is now offering so-called solutions which will make little difference to attempts to enter our country illegally.”
To the depressing figures of this whole disaster we have to add £1 billion, the annual cost of loads of products being written off because of contamination fears when migrants hide on lorries. Full loads are being destroyed.

As an apt conclusion, a British lorry driver in Calais said: “I question whether it is worth doing this job.”

Atheist Tweets with No Arguments but Lots of Intimidation

I knew that Twitter can be a great medium for harassment, but I had not experienced it until last night.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a tweet to an article about Peter Hitchens, who converted to Christianity after being for a great part of his life an atheist full of The Rage Against God (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) that is the title of his autobiographic book on the subject.

I am reading this book, which is fascinating as it shows that he was not just a nonbeliever, but one who hated God and Christianity with a vengeance. His brother Christopher, who died of cancer a few years ago, remained until his death a well-known militant atheist of the same ilk as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

A Twitter user going by the self-congratulatory misnomer of OpenMind replied to me: "[H]e [Peter Hitchens] was always a theist... claims he was atheist but 1. He was an angry theist 2. He claims to be fearful of being judged."

An exchange ensued, of which I'll spare you the details, but the crux of the matter, the gist of the dispute, is that OpenMind doesn't think it possible to be angry with something you don't believe in.

It seems very obvious that you can be angry at something you don't believe in. Even if an entity or object is not real for you, you can project on the concept you have of it characteristics that exist in real life and that you hate.

I understand that atheists generally haven't studied philosophy, but they also seem to be refractory to learning it, as I tried to explain this to OpenMind in vain.

There is a distinction to be made between the concept of something and its reality. You may very well have not only thoughts but also emotions of various types (including anger) towards something you imagine, visualise, conceptualise or think of, without necessarily believing that the object of your conceptualisation is real.

Many people, in watching horror films, experience genuine fear of the monsters which are characters depicted in the movie, although they don't believe that those monsters exist in reality.

To be quite honest, I wouldn't think that this is very difficult to grasp. It's high-school-level philosophy. But apparently it was difficult, for OpenMind and the pack of fellow atheists whom he unleashed on me and who bombarded me with tweets, all repeating the same pseudo-argument, until I was forced to block them. Twitter could be an all too easy means of harassment without this redeeming feature.

These atheist Twitter users were clearly trying to cause me aggravation and (albeit unsuccessfully) to scare me into never expressing criticisms of atheism again.

Another "reason", if we can call it that way, why, according to OpenMind, Peter Hitchens (who set fire to his Bible) could not have been an atheist is that "atheists tend not to burn books, even the bible or the quran."

The qualifier "tend to" renders such a pseudo-reason meaningless, because it leaves the door open to atheists doing it, sometimes.

Both this and the other motive explained above (an atheist cannot have anger for God) are self-serving, ad hoc definitions of the term "atheist", chosen arbitrarily to fit into a predetermined mould that can only contain good traits and positive qualities.

These atheists remind me of those homosexual activists who define "homosexuality" in such a way as to include in the definition only sexual attraction for adults and never for children. In this way, the "argument" becomes circular: a homosexual, by definition, can never be a paedophile.

Ah, if reality could be so easily manipulated as are words in the hands of liars!

Suspected Black Lives Matter Supporter Arrested for Murdering White Woman

A black man who, according to a tweet, is a Black Lives Matter supporter was arrested on Sunday for stabbing to death a white woman in Lansing, Michigan.

His name is Kenneth Dale Clark, and is 64 years old, the victim is 53-year-old Regina Marie Christensen.

Clark has been arraigned and is facing one count of homicide: open murder, which is a felony.

Clark was arrested at the scene. He and Christensen knew each other, although the nature of their relationship was unclear.

Who Decides and on What Basis that a Law Is Unjust and Must Be Disobeyed?

The great Catholic author Patrick Buchanan has penned a brilliant article, in which he wonders whether an era of civil disobedience is coming to America, "where court orders are defied and laws ignored in the name of conscience and a higher law", similar to what happened in the 1960s, but with the rebellion this time coming from the Right.

The same people who were applauding and making heroes of the civil disobeyers when these upheld principles dear to the Left are now vilifying and demonising the current-day civil disobeyers who, following their conscience, act according to principles supported by the Right.

He starts with the following example:

The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol.

Calling the Commandments "religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths," the court said the monument must go.

Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation to let voters cut out of their constitution the specific article the justices invoked. Some legislators want the justices impeached. [All emphases added]

Buchanan then reminds us that U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been defied, and those who defied them have been lionised by modernity, taking us through American history:

Thomas Jefferson freed all imprisoned under the sedition act, including those convicted in court trials presided over by Supreme Court justices. Jefferson then declared the law dead.

Some Americans want to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, who, defying the Dred Scott decision and fugitive slave acts, led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln's Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III's England.

Millions of Americans, with untroubled consciences, defied the Volstead Act, imbibed alcohol and brought an end to Prohibition.

In the civil rights era, defying laws mandating segregation and ignoring court orders banning demonstrations became badges of honor.

Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the "back of the bus."

In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine—"an unjust law is no law at all"—and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as "a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."

Said King, "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

But this statement, rather than solving a moral issue, begs the ethical question: what is an "unjust law"?

If, for example, one believes that abortion is the killing of an unborn child and same-sex marriage is an abomination that violates "eternal law and natural law," [the very same words used by one of the Fathers of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, that King invoked] do those who believe this not have a moral right if not a "moral responsibility to disobey such laws"?

Rosa Parks is celebrated. But the pizza lady who said her Christian beliefs would not permit her to cater a same-sex wedding was declared a bigot. And the LGBT crowd, crowing over its Supreme Court triumph, is writing legislation to make it a violation of federal civil rights law for that lady to refuse to cater that wedding.

But are people who celebrate the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village as the Mount Sinai moment of their movement really standing on solid ground to demand that we all respect the Obergefell decision as holy writ?

And if cities, states or Congress enact laws that make it a crime not to rent to homosexuals, or to refuse services at celebrations of their unions, would not dissenting Christians stand on the same moral ground as Dr. King if they disobeyed those laws?

Already, some businesses have refused to comply with the Obamacare mandate to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees. Priests and pastors are going to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. Churches and chapels will refuse to host them. Christian colleges and universities will deny married-couple facilities to homosexuals.

Laws will be passed to outlaw such practices as discrimination, and those laws, which the Christians believe violate eternal law and natural law, will, as Dr. King instructed, be disobeyed.

And the removal of tax exemptions will then be on the table.

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

Something like that is happening in the country.

A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural, and political views and values, is taking place.

America is disuniting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 25 years ago.

And for those who, when young, rejected the views, values and laws of Eisenhower's America, what makes them think that dissenting Americans in this post-Christian and anti-Christian era will accept their laws, beliefs, values?

Why should they? [All emphases added]

How Much Do Atheists Know about the Science and Evidence They always Appeal to?

I came across the above video by accident while researching the thorny issue of the origin of life on earth, and at first I wasn't sure who the "village1diot" of the name of this video's YouTube channel was. On the surface, it might have been referring to the Christians who are the intended victims of the hosts of what looks like a call-in TV show called The Atheist Experience, in this and many other videos. But watching them at work makes you seriously wonder whether the "village1diot" appellative doesn't refer to the show hosts themselves. I still haven't clarified that doubt to my satisfaction.

It starts badly and it gets worse.

There is a statement at the beginning about the word "atheist" supposedly deriving from the Greek goddess of wisdom. The latter is Athena, after whom the city of Athens is named. The Parthenon in Athens is named after Athena Parthenos ("Virgin"). All those in the video seem to have confused the similiarity between "atheist" and "Athena". But "atheist" stems from the Greek "atheos", meaning "without God" and composed of the privative alpha ("a") denying or lacking what follows, in this case "theos", or God.

On these premises, the Christian caller is right in spotting a contradicrion between atheism and worshipping a god, albeit female. His statement is welcome with sniggering and mockery by the hosts - one of whom for some unclear reason wears a large cross -, as if his stupidity had just been exposed, and not theirs.

But that's what he's there for, to be ridiculed.

The cross wearer, a declared atheist, then confesses his ignorance about the etymology of the word that expresses what he is. So much for choices supposedly made on a basis of rationality, science and knowledge. The other atheist doesn't seem to be any wiser either. If we consider that they run a TV show called The Atheist Experience and therefore atheism must be their specialist subject, it's particularly serious that they don't even know the derivation of the word and concept.

Then we move on to when the non-cross-wearing presenter claims that the laws of physics "can be proved or at least [pause] shown to be true in most senses." To demonstrate "the law of gravity", he performs a very neat experiment: he just drops his pen, which dutifully falls on the desk.

Pity nobody had told him that classical mechanics, of which Newton's theory of universal gravitation is part, far from being "proved or at least [pause] shown to be true in most senses", is now rejected by modern physics.

It has been superseded, and at best can be accepted only for a special set of circumstances. It has been replaced by Einstein's relativity theory and by quantum mechanics.

It can still have practical applications, but it's not considered by scientists to be "true" or "proved". Flat earth theory is also used while not regarded as true.

When a scientific theory like classical mechanics with his Newtonian universe, which had become the model for all scientific theories and the unshakeable pillar of science, was refuted - debuked, to use the common jargon - by Einstein and the quantum physicists in the early 20th century, it caused a profound crisis in the worlds of science and philosophy.

Such was the faith in science that developed in the 19th century, leading to a philosophy called "scientism", that it was considered impossible that a theory like classical physics could be refuted.

But it was. It should be a lesson that things are not as simple as some people think.

Our Moral Obligations to African Migrants and the BBC

I've just finished watching Question Time on the BBC, where one of the questions from the studio audience was whether we should help the people coming from Africa to Italy across the Mediterranean.

That question sparked a contest among the panellists for who shows most philanthropic generosity and heartfelt altruism in asserting that most definitely yes, we have an indisputable moral obligation to help them.

In their answers, the line was blurred between economic migrants and refugees in fear for their lives, escaping dangerous situations.

But hey, it was all for a good cause.

It was never mentioned that, even in the case of genuine refugees, there’s a general principle in the EU that asylum should be claimed in the first safe country that is reached, which is what so-called asylum seekers often don't do.

The UK has its own application of this principle. British charity The Refugee Council explains:

Safe third country

The Home Office deems certain countries to be places where a refugee is safe from persecution... If an asylum seeker travels through any of these states en route to the UK, he or she may be returned there on grounds of having travelled through a safe third country.

Unfortunately this is not a EU clear rule or legal requirement, giving rise to confusion.

The Dublin Regulation from which the "first safe country" principle derives is a confusing piece of legislation, so it is desirable that the ambiguities in it be dispelled by declaring that asylum seekers are obliged to claim asylum in the first safe country they can reach in their vicinity, rather than picking which country they prefer for economic reasons, which is likely to be a nation in Europe.

In case of economic migrants, there is no legal obligation to accept them. In terms of moral obligation, let's remind ourselves that the population of Africa alone is over 1 billion, to which - for moral reasons - we should add all the rest of the Third World's population in similar economic need.

Do we have a moral obligation to let all the Third World billions of inhabitants come to our shores and welcome them to our lands? In short, are we morally obliged to let our countries be destroyed?

Something else which was never mentioned during the program is that in April Muslim migrants being carried on a boat across the Mediterranean threw 12 Christians overboard to their deaths because they were not praying to Allah when they asked God for help when their dinghy suffered a puncture:

[A] Nigerian Christian prayed for his life in an innocent act that would end in the deaths of 12 fellow migrants.

One of the Muslims on board the rickety craft ordered him to stop, saying: 'Here, we only pray to Allah.'

When he refused, a violent fight ensued and 12 Christians drowned when they were thrown overboard by the Muslim refugees.

This is the sort of people we may let into our countries, not to mention the various terrorists, militants and criminals that the Islamic State controlling the Libyan coast smuggles to Europe.

Our betters, the cream of our media pundits and politicians are so concerned about "moral obligations" that they are prepared to let murderers become our next-door neighbours.

What is particularly aberrant is that the people pontificating from the height of their ethical stance in this way are not the ones who are going to bear the burden of their haughty choice. Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, and his co-pannellists on the Question Time panel last night are not likely to live in the sort of areas where immigrants and refugees reside.

Incidentally, for all those who say that all religions are the same, how many Christians do they know of who have thrown overboard, raped, tortured, beheaded or otherwise massacred Muslims in huge numbers as Muslims have done to Christians over the last few years, and about which we read every day?