Tag: england

Solid Education on the Constitution

After returning from a trip to New England last fall, which included seeing Boston and Plymouth Rock, I became more interested in how the constitution came to be and how it relates to my own English history. I decided to start the Hillsdale College Constitution 101 course shortly after Thanksgiving and earlier this week I completed the course after studying all 10 lessons and taking the final quiz.

One of the things I learned in the class was how effective America’s constitution is and how England doesn’t have one. Britain does not have a codified constitution. It is considered a living constitution that can be updated with the times. This may sound good but it isn’t. The progressives once sought a living constitution when England was at its height of empire. However the living constitution and rise of socialism led to its undoing. Today England is experiencing Orwellian crackdowns on free speech and its citizens are unable to defend themselves. The American founding fathers made sure checks and balances were set in stone with the constitution. It is not a living document.

While there may be many issues in America today, the reasons why we are still able to have free speech and defend ourselves can be found in the writings from the founding fathers and how republican American government was set up to protect individual liberty.

The Hillsdale College Constitution 101 course teaches us about why the constitution is important and why the founders set up the American system as a large Republic. They also explain the three crises in American government; the revolution and inception of the constitution. Slavery and civil war. And the ongoing battle against progressivism, which we are still fighting today.

I would highly recommend the course for all Americans.

 

More proud of America than ever

The week of thanksgiving I sat down to book tickets for my up and coming trip to the UK. One of my cousins was getting married in February and I promised that we would make it out there for the special day.

I’ve always tried to find the best priced tickets and have driven as far as Toronto in order to save money. I was fully prepared to drive out to another airport this time, when my wife came home and told me a bunch of her photographer friends were messaging her saying that ticket prices to Europe were really low.

President Trump had just been elected and the stock market was soaring. The dollar was getting stronger and it was thanksgiving week, where retailers are usually looking for your buck.

So, on the day I was ready to commit to another long drive across countries in order to afford to see my family, I typed in a search from our local Cincinnati. Sure enough, the prices were cheaper. A lot cheaper.

On this day you could buy tickets for nearly the same cost as Toronto, which always has cheap flights to Europe. I pounced on the tickets from Cincinnati. Glad to be able to get affordable tickets from a much more convenient location.

As soon as I bought the tickets I thought about my in-laws and how they had never been to Europe before. They had always wanted to see my home nation, but time and money had always been a barrier, just as it had been for us.

“Why don’t you message your parents and ask them if they want to come with us?” I suggested to my wife.

As soon as she messaged them, I added that I had never seen tickets priced that low before. I really hadn’t.

They messaged back saying that they would think about it. I thought for sure that the prices would go back up the next day.

In the morning they messaged back saying that they would love to come out there with us. I quickly checked the prices, they were still incredibly low. “I’ll be right over!” I text back.

I managed to match up flights and get them seats right next to ours on the four separate flights. I became incredibly excited about the prospect of my in-laws finally being able to see where their son-in-law grew up.

Over the next few weeks I planned and mapped out many things for them to do on their trip out with us. I wanted them to taste all the highlights and see the best parts of where I grew up. I wanted them to experience as much of the history and beauty England has to offer as possible.

What made the trip more challenging was my 10 month old son. Being so young, he needed a lot of sleep and a lot of attention. He did really well on the planes heading over and we were glad to have an extra set of hands to help out.

We decided to stay in a two bedroom flat in the heart of Canterbury, as I wanted my in-laws to be able to get straight on the train to London easily and to be able to really experience the city of Canterbury first hand.

The first few days went really well. They got to see my hometown, where I grew up, a castle, London and even my Dad’s side of the family.

They were really enjoying the trip and I was glad for that. But my wife and I weren’t getting much sleep, as our son was waking us up during the night. I was doing all the driving and I was starting to get worn out.

During the second week we took the Eurostar to Paris. I had my reservations due to the terror related incidents in the Capital, but my in-laws really wanted to see it. We left my son with his other grandmother at her fathers house in a village close to the Eurostar Terminal. He was in safe hands.

We ventured into Paris, snapping away pictures and taking it all in. It was great fun and I really enjoyed it. But the fast pace of the day really wore me out.

Between the lack of sleep and the end of the trip looming, my mood was taking a downward turn. I had enjoyed showing my in-laws around, but I still hadn’t seen half my family members and I really didn’t want to fly back the next week. I could have stayed a lot longer.

I kept my composure as best as possible, but I was having a hard time keeping my raw emotions at bay. I really didn’t want to leave. I love my home country and all my family. I could envision raising my son there. I didn’t want to go back.

My cousins wedding came and went. I got to see the rest of my family and I even managed to drive my in-laws all the way out to Stone Henge. I was extremely glad to have been able to show them so much of the UK in such a short period of time, but I was extremely drained.

In the weeks that followed, I looked up local house prices and jobs in the area. I seriously contemplated moving back. Having grown up there myself, it was easier to envision raising my son there compared to the US.

But, just as I suspected, the house prices were too high and there weren’t enough decent paying jobs. The same reasons I left the UK ten years ago were still true today.

Over the next few months several terrorist attacks happened in the UK and in places we had just visited. The attack on Westminster bridge happened exactly where my in-laws had stood for a selfie just weeks before.

I felt profoundly sad for my home nation as I read the news. I contrasted this with ever tightening security here in the US. I felt extremely glad that we had elected President Trump to office.

As spring gave way to summer and we paid my Jeep off, things became easier as my wife’s business took off and bills became easier to keep up with. I thought about the opportunities we had here and our ability to gain all the things that we have.

Many of my cousins, who are around the same age as me, still live with their parents. This is not because they are lazy bums, but simply because the house prices are so outrageously expensive. Many of them travel over an hour each way each day to work in London to make decent money.

By contrast I travel 20 minutes to work each day. I don’t make a lot of money, but it is decent. On decent money I am able to afford a house, a car and a really good quality of life. I realized fully that I wouldn’t be able to do that anywhere else in the world.

In America, if you work hard, if you take opportunities as they came, you can live well. That cannot be said anywhere else in the world. It is a real privilege.

“You realize what you have in the US would cost nearly a million pounds here right?” My friend had said to me while we were over to visit. What a contrast.

As summer moved on, my uncle called me and explained that he was going out west again on his motorcycle. The year previous he had flown all the way out there, bought a couple of bikes and been on a road trip of a lifetime with his brother out to the coast and back.

This time uncle Colin was heading out to Bonneville. After getting off the phone with him my wife told me I should go out and join him. She knew how much I had been wanting to ride a motorcycle out west.

To cut a long story short I booked off a couple of weeks of work and readied my motorcycle. After he arrived in the States, my uncle headed out ahead of me to see more of the northern states. A few says later I rode my bike from my driveway in Cincinnati, through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas, into Colorado and met him a couple of days later in Colorado Springs. From there we rode through the mountains into Utah and towards the Bonneville Salt Flats.

After a couple of days at the flats I left him, as he intended to head south to Vegas and then back east to visit his friend in Atlanta.

I then rode my motorcycle through the mountains and dessert of Nevada, past Lake Tahoe, through Sacramento and a through San Francisco before heading over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Over the next several days I rode my motorcycle up the California coast before beading back inland and through Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota.

Along the way I met many different people and saw many different places. Even in the most remote places I was able to find motels with comfy beds and warm showers and restaurants with plenty of hot food.

Again I thought to myself how lucky I was to be in this country. I could ride a motorcycle for thousands of miles across multiple states, through wildly varying terrain and still find a place to sleep for the night and a hot meal.

I wondered how many other places in the world where you could show up out of the blue and get all that at any time in the evening.

Riding across the US gave me a new appreciation for this country and gave me time to think about all that I had.

I have a big house, a loving wife and a happy and healthy son. We have everything we could ever need and some. We didn’t need to go to college, straddle ourselves in debt and become CEO’s in order to afford all this. We just had to work hard and be smart and take the best opportunities we could find. Again, where else in the world can you say that?

This country isn’t perfect and I do get home sick, but I am extremely grateful for the opportunities it has already afforded myself and my family.

I think a lot of those people who are upset with this country would do well to venture out into it and see more of it for themselves. I think they would be surprised by just how much is out there to work hard for and enjoy.

Foreign policy

This morning a friend and I were discussing foreign policy. We were talking about the situation in the Ukraine, Russia’s aggression, and the history of the cold war. My friend went into detail about America’s roll in the world in the 20th Century, and I discussed England’s role, particularly in the 19th century. We both agreed that having an English speaking nation patrolling the seas, was essential to protecting free trade, and ensuring our liberties here at home.

We discussed what we would do if either of us was president, instead of our current befuddling fool in the White House. His was more of an aggressive plan, threatening Putin, while mine was more diplomatic. If I were the president, I would use the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to send US Troops into the Northern part of the Ukraine, with a statement that the troops will be put there to ensure a peaceful transition of power while the interim government goes about holding fair elections.

ukraine 1

Many would view this as escalating the situation and provoking a third world war. Yes, it would escalate the situation, but it would stop Russia in its tracks. In fact, it may even prevent a third world war, because it would stop Russia from gobbling up sovereign nations, and consolidating more power for itself. Remember that Nazi Germany gobbled up neighboring territories in the late 1930’s, and then became unstoppable when it invaded Poland.

History is repeating itself, as it always does. Sometimes you have to meet aggression with aggression. Now I’m not saying we should go bomb Russia, or attack its troops or assets in the region. I’m simply saying we should put troops on the ground, in accordance with the existing treaty, and then figure out a peaceful deal with Russia to ensure a smooth transition of power in the Ukraine.

ukraine 2

It is my understanding that much of the Crimea is actually of Russian decent, and consider themselves Russian before Ukrainian. That’s fine, if they want to hold a referendum and rejoin Russia, that should be put on the table. The northern part of the Ukraine could then hold a referendum to install a pro western leader, and then join the EU. In this instance, both sides win, and both sides save face.

Now, if we don’t do anything, Russia will attack the Ukraine, our president will look like the idiot he actually is, and Russia will aggressively expand her territory, while we sit on our hands, with the most powerful military in the world, looking pathetic and weak, when we could easily stop the aggression, without even a shot being fired.

ukraine 3

Now, I know my libertarian friends will be furious that I would even suggest all this, but, we are the worlds foremost superpower, and we are a constitutional republic. We ensure free trade in the world, we are the check against Communist China, and aggressive nations like Russia. While I agree we should not go out of our way to meddle in other countries affairs, when we have treaties, we should enforce them. It’s a very fine line. We should promote and protect counties which want democracies and free trade.

That is my take on the situation. Unfortunately, I fear we will do nothing in this instance, and Russia will grow in power, while we sit around and do nothing but unnecessarily lose influence in the world.

What would you do if you were in power?

The filth of socialized medicine

As many of you know, I was born and raised in the UK. I have seen the NHS (National Health Service) indeed I was born in one of these glorious socialist hospitals.

As many of you also know, I absolutely and emphatically deplore anything socialist, including said healthcare system. As Ringo star once said ‘Everything the government touches turns to crap’ and this can be said of the healthcare system in Britain.

health 1

While the US system might not be perfect (and I draw it down to government interference to begin with) we can all agree that it has the best services to offer. The US outspends every other nation on the planet for healthcare, and it really does show in its services. We have more beds, more equipment and more staff.

Some of my friends and family in England will argue with me about this, saying that the US healthcare system is too expensive, and that we should have FREE healthcare like Britain does. It truly does grind my gears to hear them say this because they are all mostly very intelligent people and I love them dearly. On this particular issue though they are dead wrong. In fact, I would go as far to say; ignorance is bliss.

The UK healthcare system is a broken socialist nightmare, with long waiting lines for treatments in germ ridden hallways. While my friends and family claim that it’s free, and that everyone is covered, I have to point out ‘covered by what?’

In the UK, if you get injured; you get treated, in the US, if you get injured; you get treated. There’s not much difference, except that in the US if you don’t have health insurance you’ll get a large bill for the service. This doesn’t mean you won’t get treated, just that you’ll have to pay for it. There are systems set up to help you pay for this service. And while it can be a financial burden on your family, the choice for health coverage is your own, and there are plenty of services to help you pay for said treatment.

In the UK if you get cancer, you can wait weeks or even months for treatment; the difference between life and death. In the US, you can receive treatment immediately, with far better resources at hand to help combat the disease.

I remember a story my friend told me once about his grandfather; it was discovered that he had heart problems and urgently needed a quadruple heart bypass surgery. Without the surgery he was told he would have only 6 months left to live. He was put on a one year waiting list. The socialist system he had paid into his entire life had failed him in his hour of need. Luckily for him, his old friends all got together and set aside some money to send him to another country for private treatment.

Another story; this time about my sister. She gave birth to her son in the UK, and was put on a ward with three other mothers who had just given birth. My Mum told me the story the other day, of how the IV was held in place by masking tape, and how there was a restroom at the end of the hallway, that all the mothers who had just given birth had to walk down in order to relieve themselves. Add on top of this the fact that in order to free up bed space, they discharged my sister the day after she had given birth, before my nephew was fully stabilized and had begun feeding. The next day he was rushed into hospital because his blood sugar levels weren’t right, and he was shaking a lot. They ended up spending the next week in hospital to monitor him.

Compare this with my sister in law, who gave birth to her son in the US last year. She had her own private room and rest room. There were clean beds galore and sparkling new equipment decorating the hallways and private birthing rooms. There was even a food delivery service for meals. Compare this to the food service in UK hospitals, one of which is the hospital I was born in:

Revealed: The NHS hospital kitchens overrun by mice and cockroaches… and how three in four break food hygiene rules

By ROB COOPER

PUBLISHED: 08:10 EST, 13 October 2013 | UPDATED: 09:17 EST, 13 October 2013

Hundreds of hospital kitchens across the country are dirty, have cockroach and mice infestations or are stocking out of date food, a MailOnline investigation has revealed.

Inspectors found that three-quarters of kitchens are flouting basic food hygiene rules while nearly a third were not properly cleaned.

Six NHS hospitals had mice, two had rats, five had cockroaches and another hospital had an unspecified problem with ‘pests’.

 

 

 

The figures will raise fears that patients are being put at risk by dirty kitchens and staff ignoring proper hygiene policy.

Nationwide, hospitals spend as little as £3 a day per patient – and 82,000 meals a day are thrown out.

Campaigners said it is unacceptable that the public never find out about dirty kitchens ‘until they are teased out using Freedom of Information requests’.

An analysis of 769 environmental health inspection reports revealed that 581 hospitals across Britain are breaking the rules.

Inspectors found 229 kitchens were dirty while a further 62 were stocking out of date food.

The MailOnline obtained copies of reports carried out by environmental health teams under the Freedom of Information Act.

Inspectors at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, Kent, found mouse droppings and a ‘serious cockroach infestation that posed an imminent risk to health’ in an undercroft last November.

The Bexley Council workers found there had been a cockroach ‘population explosion’ – but it had been missed by pest control teams.

Pests: Mouse droppings are seen on a shelf by inspectors at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup. They carried out four follow-up visitsPests: Mouse droppings are seen on a shelf by inspectors at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup. They carried out four follow-up visits

 

Dirt: A fat and grease deposit is seen in the undercroft at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup. After the inspection in November 2012 they carried out cleaningDirt: A fat and grease deposit is seen in the undercroft at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup. After the inspection in November 2012 they carried out a deep clean

Mess: Inspectors take pictures of rubbish abandoned beneath lockers during their inspection at Queen Mary's Hospital, SidcupMess: Inspectors take pictures of rubbish abandoned beneath lockers during their inspection at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup

Cleaning concerns: Inspectors took this picture which shows dirt in the corners of the kitchen which had not been properly cleaned at Queen Mary's HospitalCleaning concerns: Inspectors took this picture which shows dirt in the corners of the kitchen which had not been properly cleaned at Queen Mary’s Hospital

HOSPITAL KITCHENS WITH COCKROACHES, RATS AND MICE

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2441248/NHS-hospital-kitchens-overrun-mice-cockroaches.html#ixzz2hcALi7Fz 
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You can read more by clicking on the link.

As you can see, while many of my friends and family claim that his service is ‘free’ I have to point out that it is not, and that their taxes pay for it. That money would be better spent on private healthcare. When they tell me healthcare is too expensive and that the poor will suffer, I tell them that there are charities that can help with getting the poor coverage when they need it most.

The same people that tell me the US healthcare system is too expensive are the same people who deny there is anything wrong with the UK health system. While I agree there are flaws in the US health system. I’ll take it any day over Britain’s socialist healthcare system. The difference in service is undeniable.

I weep for Mother England

Just a few decades ago England was caught up in the wrath of socialism. Almost everything was nationalized. The coal industry, the gas industry, rail, telecom, you name it, it was all owned and operated by the UK government. Britain was in deep decline, its Empire packing up, its debts soaring, it truly was ‘the sick man of Europe’.

Then came along Margaret Thatcher, who turned socialism on it’s head, privatized the major industries, sold off government owned homes and put Britain back on track toward prosperity. What a decade the 80’s were, and what a decade the 90’s were, riding on the previous decade’s coattails.

Alas, after 11 1/2 years of Thatcher, and 18 years of conservative government, along came the socialists with their ‘New Labour’. House prices soared, gas prices soared, and many, including myself fled in despair.

After 13 years of socialism, Britain was beginning to fail again, and while there is now a coalition government headed by the conservatives, these politicians are weak kneed and not nearly as principled as they need to be. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister has said that he does not have many convictions, and is a ‘liberal conservative’. This is the man that stands against a far greater threat to British sovereignty; the rise of ‘Red Ed’ and his Marxist policies. Ed Milliband, the leader of the Labour party, has pledged to re-nationalize industries, and punish those that make a profit. His ideology stems from his father, who was a preacher of the philosophy of Karl Marx, and who is indeed buried in the same cemetery, only a few feet from his beloved (albeit insanely wrong) prophet.

Back to the future with Marxist Miliband: If Britain falls for Ed’s socialist farce, it really will be a tragedy 

By RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

PUBLISHED: 17:06 EST, 23 September 2013 | UPDATED: 17:26 EST, 23 September 2013

So now we know Ed Miliband’s master plan. He wants to bring back socialism. No great surprise there, then.

Miliband’s late father was one of Britain’s most prominent Marxist ‘intellectuals’. In other words, he was spectacularly wrong on every single major issue.
 
My old man’s a Marxist,
He wears a Marxist’s hat,
He wears old corduroy trousers,
And he lives in a £2 million flat.
(In Primrose Hill).

Pity Ralph Miliband isn’t still alive. I’d have loved to hear his views on Labour’s proposed ‘mansion tax’. But clearly some of his discredited ideas have rubbed off on his youngest son.

Whatever’s wrong with modern Britain, the solution isn’t socialism. We tried that and look where it got us.

I’m not talking about the blood-soaked socialism which led to gulags and genocide in Eastern Europe and China. Or the sociopathic socialism which has turned North Korea into a Mad Hatter’s prison camp.

Let’s consider the particularly British brand of socialism, which still has plenty of devoted disciples in the Labour Party, including its weird leader.

The idea that the State could and would provide has been tested to destruction. Rampant socialism turned post-war Britain into a bankrupt basket case.

Nationalisation robbed industry of the incentive to modernise. For decades, Britain turned its back on the free market economics which once made us the richest nation on earth.

Unions exercised a stranglehold on the means of production and distribution. In the name of the ‘workers’, stroppy shop stewards called strikes at the drop of a hat.

Most of the union leaders on parade in Brighton this week salivate at the prospect of turning the clock back to that era of debilitating, daily disruption.

When I was covering British Leyland in the 1970s, there was a grand total of 27 separate strikes across the company on a single day. When the toolmakers went back to work, the delivery drivers walked out. At Longbridge, workers on the night-shift were literally sleeping on the job.

Billions of pounds of public money was poured into subsiding products no one wanted to buy. 

I’ve written before about the taxpayer-funded excesses at British Steel. On the day the corporation’s chairman, Mr Pastry-lookalike Sir Charles Villiers, announced a record £1 billion loss, he threw open the doors to the executive dining room and invited Fleet Street’s finest to join him in a sumptuous feast from an all-you-can-eat buffet, groaning with suckling pigs, whole salmon, roast sirloins of beef and vintage claret.

 

Still, what’s a couple of grand on a jolly-up when the taxpayers  are already lumbered with a  billion-pound tab?

And what was the upshot of all this largesse at the public’s expense? British Steel and British Leyland both went bust because they couldn’t withstand the chill winds of foreign competition.

Back then, it took six months to get the Post Office to install a telephone in your home. Try telling that to a generation who upgrade their mobiles every five minutes.

If you wanted a cooker, you could buy one only from the nationalised electricity or gas boards and then wait obediently until they could be bothered to hook it up. 

Council tenants couldn’t even paint their front doors without permission in triplicate from a gauleiter at the local authority. 

Had Labour won the 1979 election, inefficient, loss-making coal mines would still be open and Arthur Scargill would be sitting in the House of Lords. At least we might have been spared all those hideous wind farms cluttering up the countryside.

Commuters moan about the private rail companies, but if the railways had remained nationalised they’d still be running filthy, dilapidated rolling stock and Bob Crow’s RMT union would be on strike most of the time.

Old Labour presided over a siege economy. At one stage, you weren’t allowed take more than £50 out of the country when you went on holiday. The top rate of tax was 97 per cent, the standard rate 35 per cent. Someone had to pay for all this glorious socialism.

Mrs Thatcher changed all that. The 1997 New Labour government was forced to accept her settlement. But the Left resented Thatcher with a toxic hatred, which came bubbling to the surface when she died.

The hardline socialists didn’t disappear, however. They simply mutated into local government and the institutions.

Those organisations still under the yoke of socialist bureaucracies — such as the NHS and most Town Halls — are notorious for centralised control, waste and almost total lack of accountability.

Whereas once the socialists wanted out of Europe altogether, they now embrace the EU and all its works as a device for imposing their will on an unwilling public. The EU itself is a socialist construct, top-down and anti-democratic.

After the nationalised industries went belly-up, the socialists set about nationalising every aspect of our daily lives, through quangos such as the Health And Safety and Equality Commissions and the ‘human rights’ racket.

The entire ‘diversity’ industry is a socialist front aimed not at eradicating discrimination, but persecuting individuals and criminalising Christianity, which has traditionally been socialism’s sworn enemy.

In the name of ‘equality’, Labour smashed the grammar schools, hobbling social mobility and harming the very people it claimed it was trying to help.

Gordon Brown’s creation of a vast, supplicant state was the imposition of socialism by any other name. He paid for it by letting the banks run riot rather than raising income tax. But the end result was bankruptcy, as it always is under Labour.

Ed Miliband hasn’t yet spelled out his vision of our socialist future, but the policies we know about give us a reasonable idea. 

Labour’s answer is a re-run of the tax-and-spend disaster movie which got us into this mess in the first place. 

The modern face of socialism manifests itself in the shape of the same old ‘bash the rich’ politics of resentment, a war on wealth creation and a shopping list of generous ‘giveaways’ funded by reckless borrowing and higher taxes.

Ed Miliband’s father could have reminded him of his beloved Karl Marx’s observation that history always repeats itself, ‘first as tragedy, second as farce’.

If Britain falls for Miliband’s socialist farce, it really will be a tragedy.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2430140/richard-littlejohn-if-britain-falls-eds-socialist-farce-really-tragedy.html#ixzz2gz6HMCU7 
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Marxist Milliband is leading the charge back toward decay in Britain, with his rallying call of ‘yes I’m bringing back socialism’ to his misguided followers.

‘I’m bringing back socialism’: Miliband’s boast as he unveils plan to increase minimum wage and tax the rich more

By MATT CHORLEY, MAILONLINE POLITICAL EDITOR

PUBLISHED: 06:34 EST, 21 September 2013 | UPDATED: 06:13 EST, 22 September 2013

 

Ed Miliband today declared he was bringing socialism back to Britain as he unveiled a raft of left-wing policies.

The Labour leader promised to increase wages for the lowest paid, force schools to stay open for longer and monitor how many women appear on TV.

Taking part in an open-air Q&A session in Brighton,Mr Miliband was asked when he would ‘bring back socialism’.

The son of Marxist think Ralph Miliband replied: ‘That’s what we are doing, sir.

‘It is about fighting the battle for economic equality, for social equality and for gender equality too.

‘That is a battle that is not yet won in our country.’

He warned that people on the minimum wage are more than £860-a-year worse off because of the rising cost of living.

The Labour leader unveiled plans to dramatically increase the guaranteed rate of pay to reverse the impact of inflation in the last three years.

Mr Miliband hit out at global banks who make huge profits but claim they cannot afford to pay their cleaners ‘a bit more’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2427887/Ed-Miliband-Im-bringing-socialism-Labour-leader-plans-increase-minimum-wage-tax-rich-more.html#ixzz2gz78VdI1 
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It is no secret that I love my mother country, but I despair at how far she has fallen. Once the most powerful nation on the planet, Britain is now being strangled by bureaucrats, and decay is again setting in. I only hope that the UK has its own Tea Party of sorts in the near future to put itself back on track before it is too late.

Homesick

Since my birthday on the 21st November, I have become quite homesick. I had a great day; I went out to eat with my wife, and then we went and watched the new James Bond movie. While watching Skyfall I got to see areas of London which I recognized, and I started to feel the pangs of feeling homesick and missing sites that I was familiar with. England might not be the freest country in the world, but it is certainly not a dictatorship. England has given the world many modern conveniences and freedoms. The Magna Carta was used heavily in the formation of the US constitution, and British scientists continue to push the world forward in human discoveries.

I was born and raised in a small city called Canterbury; a city made famous by its ancient cathedral and by Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘the Canterbury Tales’. It is very much a tourist city, with education at its heart; it has three universities.

Canterbury (Listeni/ˈkæntərˌbɜri/ or /ˈkæntərˌbɛri/)[1] is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour.

Originally a Brythonic settlement called *Durou̯ernon (composed of the ancient British roots *duro- “stronghold”, *u̯erno- “alder tree”), it was renamed Durovernum Cantiacorum by the Roman conquerors in the 1st century AD. After it became the chief Jutish settlement, it gained its English name Canterbury, itself derived from the Old English Cantwareburh (“Kent people’s stronghold”). After the Kingdom of Kent’s conversion to Christianity in 597, St Augustine founded an episcopal see in the city and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, a position that now heads the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion (though the modern-day Province of Canterbury covers the entire south of England). Thomas Becket’s murder at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 led to the cathedral becoming a place of pilgrimage for Christians worldwide. This pilgrimage provided the theme for Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century literary classic The Canterbury Tales. The literary heritage continued with the birth of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in the city in the 16th century.

Parts of the city have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Many historical structures remain, including a city wall founded in Roman times and rebuilt in the 14th century, the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey and a Norman castle, and perhaps the oldest school in England, The King’s School. Modern additions include the University of Kent, Canterbury Christ Church University, the University College for the Creative Arts, the Marlowe Theatre, and the St Lawrence Ground, home to Kent County Cricket Club. The city lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a local government district.

Canterbury is a popular tourist destination: consistently one of the most-visited cities in the United Kingdom,[2] the city’s economy is heavily reliant upon tourism. There is also a substantial student population, brought about by the presence of three universities. Canterbury is, however, a relatively small city, when compared with other British cities.

I was born in Canterbury, and went to schools in the city growing up. I attended St Stevens Infant and Junior schools (protestant Christian schools) as a young boy, and attended Canterbury High school through my teenage years. My parent’s philosophy is to live and let live, and to be considerate of others. I was quite shy growing up, but I loved my home town and was very proud of my British heritage. My family goes back hundreds of years, and I am from English heritage as far back as records go. I recently found out through my uncle on my last visit that one of my great great great grand mother’s was Irish, and that her husband brought her back to England. As far as I am aware, my family has always lived in the south east of England.

My home country is very much steeped in tradition, and the ideals of being ‘proper’ are very prominent. English people for the most part live very structured lives, and when I met my wife, I very rebelliously found out that things didn’t have to be that way. In America you can be anything that you want to be. But now as I mature into adult life, I realize that structure is important. I see so many Americans working all hours of the day chasing their tails and not fully experiencing life itself. Sure they might have a big house and a fancy car, but they never have time to fully enjoy it. I look at the Universities and realize I could never go to them through the shear costs. Now that I am fast approaching my later twenties, and the talk of children continues to come up between my wife and I (both our younger sisters now have children) I wonder what kind of life they will be able to have in this country. The land of opportunity seems to be consuming itself, and has become more divided than ever. England has been through its share of ups and downs, and appears to be resilient to the tides of change. America I fear, will not be able to cope with the changes that it now faces.

I want to live in a free world, where anyone can be what they want to be. I do not want some over authoritarian government watching my every move and telling me what I can and cannot do.

I lived within Canterbury’s city limits until age 9 when my parents moved us to a small village called ‘Sturry’ which was right on the outskirts of the city. It was a short 4 mile hike to the center of Canterbury, but we had a house that overlooked a field, and it felt very rural. Sturry is where my mum’s family have lived for over a hundred years, and the village itself is steeped in history.

Human habitation in Sturry is thought to have started around 430,000 years ago, as dated flint implements – namely knives and arrow-tips – show. Other signs of early human activities include a collection of axes and pottery shards from the Bronze Age and more pottery from the Sturry Hill gravel-pits, and a burial-ground near Stonerocks Farm showed that there was an Iron Age settlement of Belgic Celts (who gave Canterbury its pre-Roman name of Durovemum) from the end of the 2nd Century BC. All this evidence indicates that human habitation of some kind existed on the north bank of the River Stour, on Sturry’s site, for hundreds and thousands of years. When the Romans arrived, they built Island Road (the A28) to connect Canterbury, the local tribal capital, with the ferry to the Isle of Thanet, with a branch to their fort at Reculver.

The most important era for Sturry, determining its future shape, size, function and name, was that part of the early 5th century when the beleaguered Romano-Britons brought in Frisians and Jutes as mercenaries to help them fight against invading Picts and Scots, and rewarded them with land. Some of them settled near Sturry: their cemetery was found at Hersden. Then in the mid 5 Century, Kent was re-organised into lathes, or districts. Sturry was the first; Stour-gau, meaning district or lathe on the Stour. The lathe was bounded by the Stour as far as Canterbury in the North by the sea, and farther south as distant as Wye.

The remains of a large village water mill lie near the parish church, and the High Street retains some charming historic buildings. The village virtually adjoins one of the smallest towns in England, Fordwich, where there are further interesting buildings, including the historic Town Hall. Fordwich itself is smaller in size than Sturry. A rare survival, a small granary, constructed with wooden weather-boards is located at Blaxland Farm and has nine staddle stones supporting it. A barn from Vale Farm, Calcott has been re-erected at the Museum of Kent Life, Sandling. A 16th Century manor house and oasthouse, built in 1583 and which belonged to St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury still stand in Sturry village beside the medieval tithe barn – although they have all been incorporated into the King School after they were sold by the widow of Lord Milner in 1925.

Since the 1960s a large number of satellite housing estates have been built on the north side of the village, mostly in former woodland, which have turned Sturry into one of the major dormitary villages for Canterbury. Nonetheless, the village is still overwhelmingly rural, with fields for arable farming and livestock grazing, and large amounts of coppice woodland. A number of market gardens can also be found in the countryside around the village. Large and deep quarries are still worked on the edge of the village, with the old workings flooded to provide recreational lakes used primarily for fishing.

During the Second World War, Sturry was one of the most badly bombed villages in England, the greater part of the High Street being destroyed by a parachute mine in 1941 during the Baedeker Blitz, killing 15 people of which 7 were children aged 12 and under.[1] One of these was a little girl who had been to the bakers’ and whose body was recovered still clutching the bag of buns she had bought.[2] The same aircraft dropped another bomb, but this landed amongst the allotments. In the book, Letters to Sturry, it is recorded that on Wednesday, 28 August 1940, there were eight separate air raid warnings and on ‘Battle of Britain Day’, 15 September 1940, a German Dornier bomber plane, (Aircraft 2651, 3rd Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 76), crash-landed in a field below Kemberland Wood near the Sarre Penne stream. Three of the five crew were killed and were firstly buried in Sturry Cemetery but then re-interred in the late 1960s into the German war cemetery at Cannock Chase.

Nonetheless a number of interesting buildings remain intact in Sturry, including St Nicholas parish church, which is predominantly Norman in style, with the oldest parts dating to about 1200. The Manor House, built in 1583, is now the junior school of The King’s School, Canterbury.

My grandmother survived the bombing of Sturry and her oldest brother has many stories to tell of German planes flying over head during the war. While England may be more progressive and socialist than in previous decades, it is still very much a capitalist society, and thrives off innovation and technologies. It should be no surprise then that I get very unnerved when I hear people supporting wars in the middle east, and check points at highways in the US. I find this to be fascism 101 and it is something which makes older generations shudder, especially my grandparents. My grandfather still remembers a V2 rocket flying alongside his fathers car while they were driving home one day, and pulling off onto the side of the road, waiting for the bomb to drop in the distance and explode.

I am feeling very homesick right now because I know that Britain will shake off the stupidity of socialism in good time, and will continue to educate its populace in the traditions of old, while teaching the importance of the sciences, math and good English. I fear that America in reaction to socialism from the left, will careen hard to the right and pick up the same failed philosophies of Adolf Hitler during the 1930’s in response to communism.

I don’t particularly consider myself a patriot of either nation, at least not in the traditional statist sense. I don’t blindly support the flag of either nation, but I am very proud of each nation’s history. I love my British heritage, and I love the constitution and values of my adopted nation.

I simply want to live in a free world, and self determine what is best for me. I want to make my own living, and not have others tell me what I can and cannot do. So long as we don’t go out of our way to hurt others, why should we be stopped from acting off our own accord?

I am beginning to care less and less about politics, it is simply a means to an end. The US is rife with corrupt politicians, and the only way to fix that is to learn about it, flush out the bad ones by replacing them, and find all the goodness that you can within yourself. Actions speak louder than words. It is not so much what you believe in that counts, it is the way that you treat others.

It is far more important to live well, educate yourself, and provide a good example than to simply point out others and call them stupid. We teach our kids by setting a good example, so why shouldn’t we live and talk to others in such a manner?

A home is created on values, and by gritting our teeth through the hard times. We must never forget our history, and we must always learn from the mistakes of the past. The world will be a much better place if we can learn to be happy and advance ourselves and enjoy life to the best degree possible, even if the rest of the world is falling apart. The world is built and rebuilt by those who look toward the future. It is up to each of us as individuals to make it a good one.

Why we fight

I have nothing to gain from these posts except a chance at a future.

There are periods in history where the individual must stand up and fight, or perish with the collective. We are currently living in such a time.

I do not relish the idea of pounding out an article each day. Well; not every day. There are days, as in recently that I’d rather just wake up, take a shower, make a pot of coffee, cook breakfast and take the dog for a walk, and not think about anything but the fresh morning smell and the sun rising.

The reason I study politics and philosophy is because politics affects my life whether I like it or not, and philosophy is the key to unlocking the potential to change the status quo and deal with life in general.

In a political sense, I do not fall into the left/right paradigm. It makes no sense to me, and I only take part in it when there is advancement to be gained toward liberty and economic freedom.

With the current presidential contenders from the democrats and republicans there is a dead heat. They are both as bad as each other. I don’t buy the idea that Barack Obama is an undercover Marxist Muslim here to drive the country back into the stone age. Equally I wouldn’t call Mitt Romney a great businessman, or our lord and savior. At best, these two clowns are puppets who will do whatever their financial backers tell them to. Almost all of those in power have been bought and paid for, and it does not matter if they are all Marxists in disguise or if they are fascists only interested in a quick buck. They are all bad, and they need to go.

I’m not interested in term limits, because there are good congressmen out there such as Ron Paul who have served well for over two decades. Term limits would only give the wrong-doers a tighter time frame to commit their evil acts.

Our problems are far deeper than ‘the economy’, ‘benefits’, ‘medicare/medicaid’ and all the other ‘issues’ that have been trumped up by the past administrations and played like a pied piper for all of us to debate about fruitlessly and endlessly.

The United States has the most advanced document that enshrines human freedom ever conceived by human intelligence. The protection of this document and the enforcement of it by its citizens is paramount to the survival of this country and to the world.

Before the US constitution there was the Magna Carta, a document which was signed in my very own home town of Canterbury, England. For me; freedom and the ability to say and do as you please runs deep.

If we do not restrict the power of government from both sides of the US political isle soon, we will lose the ability to do so entirely.

For my generation, it really is liberty or death. We are not much interested in all the other ‘issues’. On our current path; which is nearing hyperinflation; we know that the economy will fail. We can deal with that, we can rebuild that. But if we lose freedom now, we will never again see it in our lifetime. Economies boom and bust, but can be rebuilt. But can a country which has lost its moral compass return to freedom so quickly? I doubt it.

No one in my age group who I have spoken to seriously about politics is going to vote for Romney or Obama. They are all Ron Paul supporters. We will all be voting for Gary Johnson in this election period, in support of the same ideals. If you are serious about defending liberty, and providing a chance at a future for my generation, I suggest you do the same.

It does not matter if we win the election or not. Mitt Romney is not going to beat Barack Obama. Romney is too stiff, too out of touch, and his rejection of the young and grassroots movements has already cost him the election.

Can we survive another four years of Obama? That is uncertain. Can we afford not to make a difference in this election? No. We must make a difference. The more people vote libertarian, the bigger the message will be to Washington to change its ways. Who knows, we might even win.

Freedom is not won overnight. It takes many battles, many of which will be lost, but over time the message will spread and the war will be won. But it is up to the individuals to stand up and make a difference. And that is why we fight.