I was wrong
I was having a chat with my son about Christianity recently. We were both religious in our early years but are now atheists. We have however had enough contact with Christianity for us both to regard it as "a good thing". More precisely, we agree that in our present time of all values and rules being seriously challenged, Christianity provides guidelines for behaviour that can guide us safely through the large and small decisions of modern life
I certainly experienced that personally. I was 17 in 1960 and the 60s was another era of all values being challenged and all customs questioned. It was a great era of drug and alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity -- "free love". Many young people went off the rails in that era and were permanently damaged in various ways. I particularly member the vagueness of mind and speech of pot-heads.
But I was by that time already firmly ensconced in a very evangelical form of Christianity that demanded adherence to Biblical standards of behaviour. And I enjoyed it! I knew who and where I was and what to do and not do. I had certaintly and fellowship. It is still a warm memory. And to this day I do try to live a Christian life, even if I no longer share the religion behind it.
So I came out of the 60s in the army, with a degree, in good health, with substantial savings and with no addictions. I was of course teetotal. And there were various female persons whose company I enjoyed. I became an atheist at around 19 years of age but by then Christianity had been good to me when I needed it.
My fundamentalist background still influenced my thinking in some ways, however. In particular, the Church of England has always had a weird fascination for me. It is about as opposite to Christianity as I had known and practiced it as could be. It had the form of a Christian church but seemed an empty shell by my standards. What kept such a strange institution going?
In particular, their permissiveness towards homosexuality seemed simply anti-Christian to me. There are such strong and repeated condemnations of it in the Bible that I had to regard the C of E as a pretend church, a pretend form of Christianity, with a higher value for "bells and smells" than for the Bible. Central Christian doctrines of redemptoion and salvation were mentioned by them only in passing and then with some embarrasment. Someone once said that all you need to be an Anglican is to have good taste and that seemed to sum it up to me
But I now think I was too hasty. My son pointed out to me that attitude to homosexuality is only the tiniest part of the Christian message and that in other ways the C of E and other mainstream churches did still preach a lot of the Christian message. They have helped keep some awareness of Christianity alive. In particular they actually took the Christian message to homosexuals. So even in a diluted form, receiving the Christian message did create an awareness of a set of guidelines that could offer a way through the totally challenged values in modern life. I now see the C of E as missionaries -- missionaries to non-Christians and wobbly Christians. I now think they do a good work and can even forgive their "bells and smells"
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Is reform of government spending bloat possible?
By Theodore Dalrymple
President Javier Milei of Argentina has had a certain degree of success already with his radical economic policies: That is, if certain macroeconomic statistics are a sign of success. Inflation, though still very high, has declined somewhat. The budget has been in surplus for the last two months. The official exchange rate for the peso is beginning to approximate its rate on the open market, something that has not happened for a long time.
But for how long? It remains to be seen whether these successes can be maintained, for there are problems ahead both economic and political. Argentina has for decades stubbornly pursued such disastrous economic policies that any rectification is now bound to be painful and to result in at least temporary hardship for many. People who are already hard up will not take kindly to sacrifices for the sake of a supposed and still uncertain long-term advantage (no one can eat a balanced budget), and when people are living precariously, they cling to any tiny privileges or subsidies as the shipwrecked cling to whatever floating object they can find, and never mind that the grant of those privileges or subsidies caused the problem in the first place.
Those who organized the disaster will take advantage of the inevitable discontent arising from efforts to overcome it, for if there is one thing that they are skilled in, it is demagoguery. Everything about them is demagogic, from their reading of history to their opposition to any kind of real change. Their aim is the preservation of their power and their hold over the people at all costs; Mr. Milei is a real threat to them and they are not going to surrender easily. Moreover, it is likely that Mr. Milei will himself make terrible mistakes, because all powerful people do so before long. His decision, albeit quickly reversed, to accept a huge augmentation in his pay while so many Argentinians are growing poorer was a very foolish error.
But Argentina is far from the only country in dire straits. The problems both of Britain and France strongly resemble those of Argentina, though perhaps they are not (yet) so dramatic. But they too find themselves in a situation in which reform is desperately needed. Indeed, they are in Argentina’s bind: Reform is imperative; reform is impossible.
Reform is imperative for economic reasons. The governments of both countries have undertaken obligations that they cannot meet out of their own resources and increasingly must resort to borrowing to meet some other way. In a recent article in the newspaper Le Figaro, the former candidate for the French presidency, Eric Zemmour, pointed out that the French budget for the police, armed forces, and administration of justice combined now constitutes between them only a very small proportion of the whole state budget, as if the maintenance of the country’s peace, internal and external, were but some kind of minor task for the state, an afterthought, something that it can afford to attend to only once the demand for children’s creches or free abortions has been met. And unfortunately, servicing the debt that has been contracted in the meantime largely to pay for all the creches, abortions, etcetera, is likely to become the single largest call on government expenditure.
The situation in Britain is even worse, because of the greater incompetence and corruption of its public service than that of France, combined latterly with increasing costs and inefficiencies imposed by obedience to politically correct goals.
But reform is impossible because so many people have now become dependent on the state, either directly because the state pays them to do nothing, or because they are employed by the state, or because the enterprise or business for which they work is employed by the state, such that the difference between the public and the private sector is increasingly blurred. When I look around me, for example, I see a neighbor, the owner of a prosperous private consultancy whose business is helping people to obtain subsidies from various levels of government. I came across another consultancy whose business was to assist local government in reducing their payment of taxes that the central government imposes on their suppliers.
It follows that attempts to reduce government expenditure, imperatively necessary for financial reasons, would, if carried out, cause genuine hardship or discomfort to many. And if there is one thing that a modern democracy promises its members, it is increasing comfort, or at the very least the avoidance of discomfort. It would not be very difficult to trigger social discontent and violence on a large scale.
There is a kind of dialectic at work here: First, the government makes people dependent on it; then the government becomes dependent on the people whom it has made dependent on it. From this infernal cycle, it is not easy to escape. The former head of the European Commission, Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, once said, of European politicians, “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
Mr. Milei came to power with a clear majority because the situation in Argentina was so bad that it was obvious to a large proportion of the population that something in the country had to change, and change drastically. But if 55 percent of Argentinians voted for him, 45 percent did not; and while psephologists might consider this a very large difference, I do not think it would take very much for it to melt away and reverse. After all, euphoria has more in common with despair and anger than with good sense. Most of us live in the short term and are reluctant enough to make sacrifices for our own good, let alone for the good of others.
People in Britain and France should pay close attention to what is happening in Argentina, for it is a laboratory for their own future. There are differences of course; the French economy, for example, has already in effect been dollarized by its adherence to a currency that it does not control, the euro.
Incidentally, I saw an unintentionally funny line in an article about Argentina’s proposed dollarization. It would, it said, halt Argentina’s addiction to the money printing machine. Ha! Try telling that to an American monetarist!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/is-reform-possible-5611408
***********************************************Fitness organization pays a price for letting gender-confused men into its women's locker rooms
But only a sharp drop-off in their female membership is likely to change their minds
At Planet Fitness, you can exercise everything but your right to privacy.
That’s the message customers are taking to heart after an Alaskan woman had her membership revoked for complaining about a man in the women’s locker room.
The gym is a “no judgment zone,” Patricia Silva was told. Well, it’s about to become a profit-free zone, too, thanks to angry Americans who are putting the company’s stock in a $400 million free-fall.
In a perfect snapshot of where corporate wokeness will lead these days, the media is reporting that within five days of Silva’s story hitting social media, Planet Fitness lost almost a half-billion dollars in value—crashing 7.8% in less than a week. “The company’s value dropped from $5.3 billion on March 14 to $4.9 billion on March 19,” reports show, “and its shares are down by 13.59% compared to a month ago.”
Despite the pushback, the business stubbornly stuck by the mixed-sex policy, insisting that it doesn’t matter if members felt uncomfortable. “This discomfort,” the company’s operational manual argues, “is not a reason to deny access to the transgender member.”
In a video she took from the Fairbanks location, Silva said, “I just came out of Planet Fitness. There is a man shaving in the women’s bathroom,” viewers find out later after she posts a picture.
“I love him in Christ,” she makes clear. “He is a spiritual being having a human experience. He doesn’t like his gender so he wants to be a woman, but I’m not comfortable with him shaving in my bathroom. I just thought I’d say it out loud.”
When Silva confronted the man in the restroom, he replied, “Well, I’m LGB … .” She interrupted, “But you’re a man invading my space!” She ultimately walked away and went to the front desk. “‘Are you aware that there is a MAN shaving in the women’s bathroom?’” she asked. “‘ … I’m not OK with that.’ The two men standing at the desk, put their heads down and their tails between their legs!” Silva recounted. “As I was walking out the door … at my back, a woman shouts, ‘It’s a girl!’ … I shouted back, ‘It’s a man!’”
Silva was especially irate that a young girl, who “could have been 12 years old,” was exposed to the same man. She stood in the same room in a towel and “kind of freaked out.”
The next day, she posted on Facebook that she got a call from Planet Fitness “announcing that they have chosen to cancel my membership rather than protect [young] girls and women … that enter the women’s locker room from men with a penis. … Despicable.”
And yet, even now, flooded with complaints and nationwide criticism, the company stands by its decision, telling Libs of TikTok that the staff will “work with members and employees to address this discomfort [sharing facilities with transgender members] and to foster a climate of understanding consistent with the ‘Judgment Free’ character of Planet Fitness.”
Then, doubling down, the business vowed to continue calling trans-identifying customers by their preferred pronouns and “other terms consistent with their self-reported gender identity, if reasonably known to the Planet Fitness staff.”
None of this should come as a surprise, since the company has a long and unflattering past of siding with trans activists over women who feel victimized by their male presence. In 2015, Yvette Cormier, a member of a Michigan branch, had the exact same experience—well before the movement had risen to the public prominence it has now.
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Gay conversion banned in NSW after all-night debate
It seems that most talk is unaffected by this bill so that is good but some more active therapy offered by non-psychologists will clearly be banned. That clearly affects the offerings of certain church-based groups.
What is unclear is if qualified pychologists are allowed to offer more than talk. Are active therapies such as behaviour therapy allowed? Such therapies can be very effective. Restrictions on proven active therapy are unfair to the minority who WANT all available help towards normalizing their feelings. Not all homosexuals are happy about the way they are
Gay conversion practices will be banned in NSW after the state’s parliament passed new laws following a marathon debate that stretched into the early hours of Friday morning.
Bleary-eyed members of the upper house supported Labor’s Conversion Practices Ban bill just after 6.30am on Friday after debate kicked off at 11pm on Thursday with a number of attempted amendments from the Coalition, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and the Greens.
However, the government had stressed it would not be changing its bill and when it returned to the lower house just before 7am, NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley said, “history is made”.
“Our friends in the LBTQ+ community deserve that history,” Daley told parliament, thanking MPs for the “respectful way in which this debate has been conducted”.
The ban, which was the focus of months-long discussions between the government, LGBTQ advocacy groups and religious organisations, will outlaw practices that attempt to change or suppress a person’s sexual identity, following a 12-month introduction period. It will also be illegal to take someone outside of NSW to undergo conversion therapies.
NSW follows Victoria and the ACT, where conversion therapy has already been outlawed.
The bill has some exceptions for religious groups, meaning, for example, it is still legal to give a religious sermon that preaches against homosexuality or pray with someone experiencing same-sex attraction.
Exemptions are also given to registered psychologists and families, with conversations in those settings still legal under the bill.
NSW Premier Chris Minns said he was comfortable with the exemptions. “The exemptions relate to medical professionals and counsellors, those that are governed by a professional association … There [are] also exemptions for families because we recognise parents are primarily responsible for raising their kids and they need to be able to have honest conversations with their children,” he said on 2GB on Friday morning.
Independent MP Alex Greenwich, who withdrew his own version of a bill to ban the practice last year to work with the government on its own legislation, celebrated the news outside Parliament on Friday morning.
“NSW is waking up as a safer place for LGBTQ people today,” he said, adding that the bill sends “a really clear message that LGBTQ people are loved, are beautiful, and now, any futile attempts to change who we are is against the law”.
Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown said the passing of this legislation shows that governments shouldn’t be afraid of pursuing LGBTQ reform.
“This is a historic day and this law will save lives,” she said, saying conversion practices are “alive and well in NSW”, with people aged in their 20s coming forward as victims of these practices in recent years.
Teddy Cook, the director of community health at ACON and a survivor of conversion practices, praised the legislation for being inclusive of transgender Australians.
“We truly wake up today with more pride and more euphoria than the state has perhaps ever experienced,” he said.
“As a proud trans man, I wake up here after a huge night knowing that this state is telling us loud and clear that we are perfect.”
Announcing the news outside Parliament on Friday morning, Penny Sharpe, the leader of the government in the upper house, said the passing of the bill was “a very long time coming”.
“It’s been many years of advocacy for many people,” she said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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