Podcasts about Good Sunday

Good Sunday to you,I am headed to Birmingham and Huddersfield week after next. If you are in either neck of the woods, come and see the show.Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got ‘til it's goneJoni MitchellBack in the 1980s I remember the newly privatised British Telecom, in its wisdom, decided to get rid of Britain's red telephone boxes and replace them with things made of glass or was it perspex? The originals were designed, I've since read, by one Giles Gilbert Scott, who got the gig as a result of a design competition. (I've since learned he also designed Battersea Power Station, so he was quality).British Telecom wanted a rebranding, so somebody at HQ decided to waste lord-knows-how-much money getting rid of however many phone boxes there were around the country - they're cast iron so this was not an easy job, nor a cheap one - and replace them with something better, which inevitably turned out to be worse.Here's the iconic before:Here's what they replaced them with:I barely remember these. You probably don't either. Because they were soon got rid of and replaced with these. Why did they bother?The glass replacements are just so bland you cannot not even describe them as ugly. They are just characterless nothings. Why people in corporations feel this need to glassify everything - it's happened to buildings as well, of course - is beyond me. I guess they think it's “dynamic”. (Indeed, they've done something similar to language).BT justified the rebranding by saying existing phone boxes got vandalised: prostitutes and mini cab drivers left their calling cards in them, people pissed in them. All of this is true, but there were other ways of dealing with these issues. (It's not unlike the many invented problems being cited today to justify hoisting digital ID on us). The bottom line is that the powers that be wanted a rebrand. Good for their egos, I guess. And thanks to the privatisation they now had bucket loads of capital to spend on it.Whatever. They spent a shedload and made it worse. So there I was walking along Parliament Square the other day and what did I see but a this huge queue of tourists lining up to have their photo taken by a phone box. Not one of the glass ones obviously. And I mean huge queue. See for yourself.I would say there are 40 or more people in that queue. If they each take 45 seconds for their photo, that's a good 30-minute wait.The rest of the world loves the English for who we are. For our history, our culture, our style, our character, our charm, our order, our beauty. That's why so many tourists flock here. Why are we incapable of appreciating ourselves and loving what we have created? - instead choosing to self-hate and apologise for what we have done.The rest of the world wants the England of red phone boxes, afternoon tea, good manners and Downton Abbey. They don't want England for its diversity (diversity is not London's greatest strength, despite what they mayor may tell you - London's greatest strength is that it is the capital of England, not Diversityland), nor for its gender-neutral toilets, glass fronted buildings, low trust communities or its street crime. They want England for the English.So the point of today's missive.A few years ago somebody got the no-doubt-very-well-paid gig erecting cycle sheds around the capital. Here was an opportunity to design something iconic, something which added to London - like the old red buses, black taxis, post boxes and, yes, the phone boxes. Things that characterise London, and thus things that people love London for. Here's what we got. They even put a picture of a bicycle on the side, just in case you're totally moronic.Talk about a wasted opportunity.They look like budget Anderson shelters.And what's the shelf life of one of those. Ten years, maybe?Can you see tourists seventy or eighty years from now queuing up for half an hour to get their photo taken next to one?Oh well.If you enjoyed reading this, please share it far and wide.Lots of things to share with you this week* Here ICYMI is this week's commentary:* Here is a piece from my comedy Substack about Prunella Scales, who died on Monday. It also contains an episode of a 1975 sitcom you've probably never heard of but in which she was absolutely brilliant. I urge you to watch it - you will thank me.* I made an appearance on Jeremy McKeown's new podcast, along with Tim Price, to talk gold.If you live in a Third World country, such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.* And, finally, on Friday morning at 07.34 GMT, I became a grandad. Please welcome Cecilia (name not yet confirmed) to the group.As we are headed into Christmas present season, if you are unable to follow the tradition of the Wise Men and gift actual gold, how about a book about gold instead?I deal for anyone at home or at work. The Secret History of Gold - Money, Myth, Politics and Power is available at all good bookstoresUntil next time,Dominic This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday to you,I am headed to Birmingham and Huddersfield week after next. If you are in either neck of the woods, come and see the show.Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got ‘til it's goneJoni MitchellBack in the 1980s I remember the newly privatised British Telecom, in its wisdom, decided to get rid of Britain's red telephone boxes and replace them with things made of glass or was it perspex? The originals were designed, I've since read, by one Giles Gilbert Scott, who got the gig as a result of a design competition. (I've since learned he also designed Battersea Power Station, so he was quality).British Telecom wanted a rebranding, so somebody at HQ decided to waste lord-knows-how-much money getting rid of however many phone boxes there were around the country - they're cast iron so this was not an easy job, nor a cheap one - and replace them with something better, which inevitably turned out to be worse.Here's the iconic before:Here's what they replaced them with:I barely remember these. You probably don't either. Because they were soon got rid of and replaced with these. Why did they bother?The glass replacements are just so bland you cannot not even describe them as ugly. They are just characterless nothings. Why people in corporations feel this need to glassify everything - it's happened to buildings as well, of course - is beyond me. I guess they think it's “dynamic”. (Indeed, they've done something similar to language).BT justified the rebranding by saying existing phone boxes got vandalised: prostitutes and mini cab drivers left their calling cards in them, people pissed in them. All of this is true, but there were other ways of dealing with these issues. (It's not unlike the many invented problems being cited today to justify hoisting digital ID on us). The bottom line is that the powers that be wanted a rebrand. Good for their egos, I guess. And thanks to the privatisation they now had bucket loads of capital to spend on it.Whatever. They spent a shedload and made it worse. So there I was walking along Parliament Square the other day and what did I see but a this huge queue of tourists lining up to have their photo taken by a phone box. Not one of the glass ones obviously. And I mean huge queue. See for yourself.I would say there are 40 or more people in that queue. If they each take 45 seconds for their photo, that's a good 30-minute wait.The rest of the world loves the English for who we are. For our history, our culture, our style, our character, our charm, our order, our beauty. That's why so many tourists flock here. Why are we incapable of appreciating ourselves and loving what we have created? - instead choosing to self-hate and apologise for what we have done.The rest of the world wants the England of red phone boxes, afternoon tea, good manners and Downton Abbey. They don't want England for its diversity (diversity is not London's greatest strength, despite what they mayor may tell you - London's greatest strength is that it is the capital of England, not Diversityland), nor for its gender-neutral toilets, glass fronted buildings, low trust communities or its street crime. They want England for the English.So the point of today's missive.A few years ago somebody got the no-doubt-very-well-paid gig erecting cycle sheds around the capital. Here was an opportunity to design something iconic, something which added to London - like the old red buses, black taxis, post boxes and, yes, the phone boxes. Things that characterise London, and thus things that people love London for. Here's what we got. They even put a picture of a bicycle on the side, just in case you're totally moronic.Talk about a wasted opportunity.They look like budget Anderson shelters.And what's the shelf life of one of those. Ten years, maybe?Can you see tourists seventy or eighty years from now queuing up for half an hour to get their photo taken next to one?Oh well.If you enjoyed reading this, please share it far and wide.Lots of things to share with you this week* Here ICYMI is this week's commentary:* Here is a piece from my comedy Substack about Prunella Scales, who died on Monday. It also contains an episode of a 1975 sitcom you've probably never heard of but in which she was absolutely brilliant. I urge you to watch it - you will thank me.* I made an appearance on Jeremy McKeown's new podcast, along with Tim Price, to talk gold.If you live in a Third World country, such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.* And, finally, on Friday morning at 07.34 GMT, I became a grandad. Please welcome Cecilia (name not yet confirmed) to the group.As we are headed into Christmas present season, if you are unable to follow the tradition of the Wise Men and gift actual gold, how about a book about gold instead?I deal for anyone at home or at work. The Secret History of Gold - Money, Myth, Politics and Power is available at all good bookstoresUntil next time,Dominic This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday to you,Before we go to today's piece, let me flag this week's commentary - on the action in the gold and silver markets, in case you missed it. A blip or the start of something more significant?So to the osteopath who isn't an osteopathI first met Michelle Davies at a James Delingpole event. She was buying one of my books and wanted to pay in bitcoin, which got her an immediate gold star. She mentioned quite matter-of-factly that she was an osteopath who had been struck off and, “would I like some treatment?”.As a man with many ailments accumulated over the decades, a large portion of which I have given up trying to heal, I couldn't see much downside to the offer. She might even be able to cure one of the incurables. “Why not?”, I thought.A few days later, in a studio near Worcester, she placed her hands behind my head, went still for a moment, announced that my energy channels were “terrible - blocked, nought out of ten,” manipulated my neck and head for a bit, muttered to herself, sighed, told me off for swearing, got me to speak into a microphone, and then began “sending me frequencies.” I left feeling oddly lighter.So I went back.“I'm trying to have a lucid dream,” I told her. “But I'm not making much progress.”I explained the difference between a vivid dream, which is what it says on the tin, and a lucid dream, which is a dream in which you know you are having a dream, while you have the dream. Keener readers will remember to “get better at lucid dreaming” was one of my ambitions for 2025.“Oh,” she said. “I might be able to help with that.” And she went to work on my channels again.That night, I had nine dreams. Nine. Normally I'd be lucky to remember one or two. None were fully lucid, but still - progress.I went back again. “Can you help me with my ankle?” I've got flat feet and my ankles are very stiff as a result. I've broken my right ankle five times.She held it, paused, and began to cry. “There's so much pain here,” she said. “I can't fix it completely,” she declared, “but I can make it much better”.My ankles are one of the many banes of my life. I still play football, but I am incapable of “putting my laces through it” - that is shooting with my instep. I've not been able to shoot properly since I was in my early 20s. It hurts so much - my foot involuntarily winces moments before I strike, so my whole game is little passes with the inside of my foot. It's limiting. I might get one goal in a game of six-a-side, maybe two if I'm lucky. Usually I don't score.“When are you playing next?” she asked.“Tomorrow.”“I'll broadcast to you,” she said.The following night I scored six goals. SIX.“Have you been having shooting lessons?” one of the other players asked, both miffed and baffled.“What is your biggest goal in life? Michelle asked at another session.“To get Kisses on a Postcard made,” I said.I explained what it is. We came up with a mantra, which I recorded and she layered with one of her frequencies. I began playing it each morning while doing the gentle stretches, which she told me to do, in bed. Three weeks later, I closed the seed funding round I had up to then been struggling with - oversubscribed, no less. All coincidence, I'm sure. But Kisses on a Postcard is finally moving forward.Osteopath No MoreMichelle Davies was a local osteopath in Worcester who had been practising for 25 years. Among the many things she found she was good at treating were sinusitis, asthma, anxiety, depression, baby colic & reflux, sleep issues and infections. The patient testimonials on her website confirmed as much.However, in 2016 the General Osteopathic Council (GOsC) got in touch. In case you are not familiar, GOsC is osteopathy's contribution to The Blob, the army of unaccountable regulators which runs, if that's the right word, Britain, answerable to no man. (If you think the government is in charge, you're deluded).In the great British tradition of unelected bureaucrat, GOsC has discovered the elixir of Blob: a toxic mix of arrogance, incompetence, paperwork and regulatory overreach, which will satisfactorily obstruct any attempt at progress. GOsC explained to Michelle that osteopathy can only cure 12 things, and these do not include the items which Michelle had found she could treat. Unless she removed the 75 patient testimonials, she would face a Fitness to Practise case. She did as she was told and removed the lot.“But I can and have treated these things,” she thought. “I've got 75 testimonials to prove it”.So, in 2021, she brought a claim against GOsC for damages, arguing that their actions had limited her professional scope and censored the public's voice. GOsC questioned her fitness to practise, demanded a psychiatric assessment and access to her medical notes. She refused and was struck off. She could no longer call herself an osteopath. In fact, she eventually got a criminal record for, checks notes, “impersonating an osteopath”. (Read her google reviews, if you want the patients' side of this)BTW I know nothing of GOsC and I haven't researched their side of the story, nor do I care to. They're regulators, so my default position is biased against, and unless they can demonstrably prove they warrant a better opinion, that will remain my position. So Michelle began marketing herself as the osteopath who was stuck off. Three years on she has a practice in Harley Street, charging several times her old rate.Note to any osteopaths reading this: get yourself struck off. It's great for business.If you live in a Third World country, such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.A Healing WeekI later discovered she also offers “healing weeks.” She comes to stay with you and your family for seven days and treats everyone daily. I thought we could all use a tune-up, and to my surprise when I proposed the idea, the Frisby household agreed: my eldest son (24), his heavily pregnant girlfriend (23), and my eldest daughter who lives nearby (22).Each of us had 60–90 minutes of treatment every day - osteopathic manipulation, cranial work, red and blue light therapy, terahertz wand, frequencies, castor oil packs, and more.My pregnant daughter-in-law was having problems with acid reflux and carpal tunnel numbness. Michelle got rid of the former in one session, the latter took a couple. My son's hips and ankles loosened up, and he started sleeping better. My daughter's pelvis, inflamed from a childhood incident involving a pillowcase and a staircase (news to me), finally began to settle, and she has reported improvements to her PCOS. I also sent Goat, my bassist and who makes many of my videos, for some treatment (in exchange for filming the video below). He's had a heavy stammer all his life, After three sessions, you can actually have a normal conversation with him. Meanwhile, I have become an even more astounding human being. We're all still flawed humans, but by the end of the week everyone felt lighter, happier, and healthier, and the house had a different atmosphere.Maybe I'm a sucker. Maybe it's all placebo. Does it matter? I narrated a documentary once about the placebo effect: it is real. If it works, that's all that counts, surely.Imagine a regulator approving placebo treatment …If you fancy a healing week with Michelle, find out more at www.healingwithmichelledavies.com. Just don't tell the GOsC I sent you. And if you live abroad, don't worry: one of the reasons she has started offering these weeks is that she wants to travel more. I gather she has just been booked to go to Singapore.Here's the vid: If you enjoyed this, please tell a friend.Full disclosure: Michelle gave me a discount in exchange for helping her with above vid and for a review. I insisted the review be impartial, which it was, though if my experience had been negative, I probably wouldn't have published it.Until next time,DominicPS Here, again, is this week's commentary. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday to you,Before we go to today's piece, let me flag this week's commentary - on the action in the gold and silver markets, in case you missed it. A blip or the start of something more significant?So to the osteopath who isn't an osteopathI first met Michelle Davies at a James Delingpole event. She was buying one of my books and wanted to pay in bitcoin, which got her an immediate gold star. She mentioned quite matter-of-factly that she was an osteopath who had been struck off and, “would I like some treatment?”.As a man with many ailments accumulated over the decades, a large portion of which I have given up trying to heal, I couldn't see much downside to the offer. She might even be able to cure one of the incurables. “Why not?”, I thought.A few days later, in a studio near Worcester, she placed her hands behind my head, went still for a moment, announced that my energy channels were “terrible - blocked, nought out of ten,” manipulated my neck and head for a bit, muttered to herself, sighed, told me off for swearing, got me to speak into a microphone, and then began “sending me frequencies.” I left feeling oddly lighter.So I went back.“I'm trying to have a lucid dream,” I told her. “But I'm not making much progress.”I explained the difference between a vivid dream, which is what it says on the tin, and a lucid dream, which is a dream in which you know you are having a dream, while you have the dream. Keener readers will remember to “get better at lucid dreaming” was one of my ambitions for 2025.“Oh,” she said. “I might be able to help with that.” And she went to work on my channels again.That night, I had nine dreams. Nine. Normally I'd be lucky to remember one or two. None were fully lucid, but still - progress.I went back again. “Can you help me with my ankle?” I've got flat feet and my ankles are very stiff as a result. I've broken my right ankle five times.She held it, paused, and began to cry. “There's so much pain here,” she said. “I can't fix it completely,” she declared, “but I can make it much better”.My ankles are one of the many banes of my life. I still play football, but I am incapable of “putting my laces through it” - that is shooting with my instep. I've not been able to shoot properly since I was in my early 20s. It hurts so much - my foot involuntarily winces moments before I strike, so my whole game is little passes with the inside of my foot. It's limiting. I might get one goal in a game of six-a-side, maybe two if I'm lucky. Usually I don't score.“When are you playing next?” she asked.“Tomorrow.”“I'll broadcast to you,” she said.The following night I scored six goals. SIX.“Have you been having shooting lessons?” one of the other players asked, both miffed and baffled.“What is your biggest goal in life? Michelle asked at another session.“To get Kisses on a Postcard made,” I said.I explained what it is. We came up with a mantra, which I recorded and she layered with one of her frequencies. I began playing it each morning while doing the gentle stretches, which she told me to do, in bed. Three weeks later, I closed the seed funding round I had up to then been struggling with - oversubscribed, no less. All coincidence, I'm sure. But Kisses on a Postcard is finally moving forward.Osteopath No MoreMichelle Davies was a local osteopath in Worcester who had been practising for 25 years. Among the many things she found she was good at treating were sinusitis, asthma, anxiety, depression, baby colic & reflux, sleep issues and infections. The patient testimonials on her website confirmed as much.However, in 2016 the General Osteopathic Council (GOsC) got in touch. In case you are not familiar, GOsC is osteopathy's contribution to The Blob, the army of unaccountable regulators which runs, if that's the right word, Britain, answerable to no man. (If you think the government is in charge, you're deluded).In the great British tradition of unelected bureaucrat, GOsC has discovered the elixir of Blob: a toxic mix of arrogance, incompetence, paperwork and regulatory overreach, which will satisfactorily obstruct any attempt at progress. GOsC explained to Michelle that osteopathy can only cure 12 things, and these do not include the items which Michelle had found she could treat. Unless she removed the 75 patient testimonials, she would face a Fitness to Practise case. She did as she was told and removed the lot.“But I can and have treated these things,” she thought. “I've got 75 testimonials to prove it”.So, in 2021, she brought a claim against GOsC for damages, arguing that their actions had limited her professional scope and censored the public's voice. GOsC questioned her fitness to practise, demanded a psychiatric assessment and access to her medical notes. She refused and was struck off. She could no longer call herself an osteopath. In fact, she eventually got a criminal record for, checks notes, “impersonating an osteopath”. (Read her google reviews, if you want the patients' side of this)BTW I know nothing of GOsC and I haven't researched their side of the story, nor do I care to. They're regulators, so my default position is biased against, and unless they can demonstrably prove they warrant a better opinion, that will remain my position. So Michelle began marketing herself as the osteopath who was stuck off. Three years on she has a practice in Harley Street, charging several times her old rate.Note to any osteopaths reading this: get yourself struck off. It's great for business.If you live in a Third World country, such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.A Healing WeekI later discovered she also offers “healing weeks.” She comes to stay with you and your family for seven days and treats everyone daily. I thought we could all use a tune-up, and to my surprise when I proposed the idea, the Frisby household agreed: my eldest son (24), his heavily pregnant girlfriend (23), and my eldest daughter who lives nearby (22).Each of us had 60–90 minutes of treatment every day - osteopathic manipulation, cranial work, red and blue light therapy, terahertz wand, frequencies, castor oil packs, and more.My pregnant daughter-in-law was having problems with acid reflux and carpal tunnel numbness. Michelle got rid of the former in one session, the latter took a couple. My son's hips and ankles loosened up, and he started sleeping better. My daughter's pelvis, inflamed from a childhood incident involving a pillowcase and a staircase (news to me), finally began to settle, and she has reported improvements to her PCOS. I also sent Goat, my bassist and who makes many of my videos, for some treatment (in exchange for filming the video below). He's had a heavy stammer all his life, After three sessions, you can actually have a normal conversation with him. Meanwhile, I have become an even more astounding human being. We're all still flawed humans, but by the end of the week everyone felt lighter, happier, and healthier, and the house had a different atmosphere.Maybe I'm a sucker. Maybe it's all placebo. Does it matter? I narrated a documentary once about the placebo effect: it is real. If it works, that's all that counts, surely.Imagine a regulator approving placebo treatment …If you fancy a healing week with Michelle, find out more at www.healingwithmichelledavies.com. Just don't tell the GOsC I sent you. And if you live abroad, don't worry: one of the reasons she has started offering these weeks is that she wants to travel more. I gather she has just been booked to go to Singapore.Here's the vid: If you enjoyed this, please tell a friend.Full disclosure: Michelle gave me a discount in exchange for helping her with above vid and for a review. I insisted the review be impartial, which it was, though if my experience had been negative, I probably wouldn't have published it.Until next time,DominicPS Here, again, is this week's commentary. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

10.21.25, Kevin Sheehan opens up the show talking about the Monday Night Football games and notes from the Commanders vs Cowboys game.

3-part Sunday Sermon by Jack Campbell, Walt Ranta, and Rich LambA call to do good as servants of God setting aside complacency, staying on God's side, and doing good wherever we can for his glory.Text: selected passages

Good Sunday to you,With bitcoin breaking out to record highs overnight, what a good morning it is indeed.Below is this week's commentary in case you missed it. Gold keeps on going up. So does silver. So do miners. When does the party end?On the subject of which here are the results of my twitter poll, which make for interesting reading. General consensus is, as I argued, that gold is in innings 6 of 9.But silver is only in innings one, apparently, even if breathing down the neck of $50. Gotta to love those silver bulls!Mining too is early. We shall see.For you consideration today, I thought I would share this podcast I recorded with Aussie Josh Szeps earlier in the week, talking about everything, really.Enjoy!If you live in a Third World country, such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.Until next time,DominicPS Secret History of Gold is going great guns. If you haven't got your copy, here are links to get it on Amazon and Waterstones and all good bookshops. I hear the audiobook, read by me, is excellent.Amazon is currently offering 20% off.It might be, as Merryn Somerset webb says, “the best timed book" ever. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday to you,With bitcoin breaking out to record highs overnight, what a good morning it is indeed.Below is this week's commentary in case you missed it. Gold keeps on going up. So does silver. So do miners. When does the party end?On the subject of which here are the results of my twitter poll, which make for interesting reading. General consensus is, as I argued, that gold is in innings 6 of 9.But silver is only in innings one, apparently, even if breathing down the neck of $50. Gotta to love those silver bulls!Mining too is early. We shall see.For you consideration today, I thought I would share this podcast I recorded with Aussie Josh Szeps earlier in the week, talking about everything, really.Enjoy!If you live in a Third World country, such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The bullion dealer I recommend is The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.Until next time,DominicPS Secret History of Gold is going great guns. If you haven't got your copy, here are links to get it on Amazon and Waterstones and all good bookshops. I hear the audiobook, read by me, is excellent.Amazon is currently offering 20% off.It might be, as Merryn Somerset webb says, “the best timed book" ever. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday to you,I have a short announcement today, one I'm very excited about, as this week's thought piece.Please feel free to comment, share, or get in touch if it sparks your interest.Thank you for being a subscriber to the Flying Frisby.Until next time,DominicHere, ICYMI, is the week's commentary: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday to you,I have a short announcement today, one I'm very excited about, as this week's thought piece.Please feel free to comment, share, or get in touch if it sparks your interest.Thank you for being a subscriber to the Flying Frisby.Until next time,DominicHere, ICYMI, is the week's commentary: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Frederick Christian Fellowship Church is a non-denominational church where all people, regardless of where they are on their spiritual journey, are welcome to learn about God and how to have a relationship with him. As a Christ-centered, Bible-believing church, we exist to help people reach their full redemptive potential in Christ. ___ Subscribe to our channel for fresh daily content to keep you connected and inspired all week long. ____ FCF Church Service Times: • Online: Sunday's at 9:15 AM and 11:15 AM ____ FOLLOW US Website: http://fcfchurch.com FCF Church Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fcfchurchfrederick FCF Church Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fcfchurch/

Good Sunday morning to you,I am just on a train home from Glasgow, where I have been gigging these past two nights. I've had a great time, as I always seem to do when I go north of the wall.But Glasgow on a Saturday night is something else. My hotel was right next to the station and so I was right in the thick of it. If I ever get to make a cacatopian, end-of-days, post-apocalyptic thriller, I'll just stroll through Glasgow city centre on a Friday or Saturday night with a camera to get all the B roll. It was like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting only with a Scottish accent. Little seems to have changed since I wrote that infamous chapter about Glasgow in Life After the State all those years ago. The only difference is that now it's more multi-ethnic. So many people are so off their heads. I lost count of the number of randoms wandering about just howling at the stars. The long days - it was still light at 10 o'clock - make the insanity all the more visible. Part of me finds it funny, but another part of me finds it so very sad that so many people let themselves get into this condition. It prompted me to revisit said chapter, and I offer it today as your Sunday thought piece.Just a couple of little notes, before we begin. This caught my eye on Friday. Our favourite uranium tech company, Lightbridge Fuels (NASDAQ:LTBR), has taken off again with Donald Trump's statement that he is going to quadruple US nuclear capacity. The stock was up 45% in a day. We first looked at it in October at $3. It hit $15 on Friday. It's one to sell on the spikes and buy on the dips, as this incredible chart shows.(In other news I have now listened twice to the Comstock Lode AGM, and I'll report back on that shortly too). ICYMI here is my mid-week commentary, which attracted a lot of attentionRight - Glasgow.(NB I haven't included references here. Needless to say, they are all there in the book. And sorry I don't have access to the audio of me reading this from my laptop, but, if you like, you can get the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops. The book itself available at Amazon, Apple Books et al).How the Most Entrepreneurial City in Europe Became Its SickestThe cause of waves of unemployment is not capitalism, but governments …Friedrich Hayek, economist and philosopherIn the 18th and 19th centuries, the city of Glasgow in Scotland became enormously, stupendously rich. It happened quite organically, without planning. An entrepreneurial people reacted to their circumstances and, over time, turned Glasgow into an industrial and economic centre of such might that, by the turn of the 20th century, Glasgow was producing half the tonnage of Britain's ships and a quarter of all locomotives in the world. (Not unlike China's industrial dominance today). It was regarded as the best-governed city in Europe and popular histories compared it to the great imperial cities of Venice and Rome. It became known as the ‘Second City of the British Empire'.Barely 100 years later, it is the heroin capital of the UK, the murder capital of the UK and its East End, once home to Europe's largest steelworks, has been dubbed ‘the benefits capital of the UK'. Glasgow is Britain's fattest city: its men have Britain's lowest life expectancy – on a par with Palestine and Albania – and its unemployment rate is 50% higher than the rest of the UK.How did Glasgow manage all that?The growth in Glasgow's economic fortunes began in the latter part of the 17th century and the early 18th century. First, the city's location in the west of Scotland at the mouth of the river Clyde meant that it lay in the path of the trade winds and at least 100 nautical miles closer to America's east coast than other British ports – 200 miles closer than London. In the days before fossil fuels (which only found widespread use in shipping in the second half of the 19th century) the journey to Virginia was some two weeks shorter than the same journey from London or many of the other ports in Britain and Europe. Even modern sailors describe how easy the port of Glasgow is to navigate. Second, when England was at war with France – as it was repeatedly between 1688 and 1815 – ships travelling to Glasgow were less vulnerable than those travelling to ports further south. Glasgow's merchants took advantage and, by the early 18th century, the city had begun to assert itself as a trading hub. Manufactured goods were carried from Britain and Europe to North America and the Caribbean, where they were traded for increasingly popular commodities such as tobacco, cotton and sugar.Through the 18th century, the Glasgow merchants' business networks spread, and they took steps to further accelerate trade. New ships were introduced, bigger than those of rival ports, with fore and aft sails that enabled them to sail closer to the wind and reduce journey times. Trading posts were built to ensure that cargo was gathered and stored for collection, so that ships wouldn't swing idly at anchor. By the 1760s Glasgow had a 50% share of the tobacco trade – as much as the rest of Britain's ports combined. While the English merchants simply sold American tobacco in Europe at a profit, the Glaswegians actually extended credit to American farmers against future production (a bit like a crop future today, where a crop to be grown at a later date is sold now). The Virginia farmers could then use this credit to buy European goods, which the Glaswegians were only too happy to supply. This brought about the rise of financial institutions such as the Glasgow Ship Bank and the Glasgow Thistle Bank, which would later become part of the now-bailed-out, taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).Their practices paid rewards. Glasgow's merchants earned a great deal of money. They built glamorous homes and large churches and, it seems, took on aristocratic airs – hence they became known as the ‘Tobacco Lords'. Numbering among them were Buchanan, Dunlop, Ingram, Wilson, Oswald, Cochrane and Glassford, all of whom had streets in the Merchant City district of Glasgow named after them (other streets, such as Virginia Street and Jamaica Street, refer to their trade destinations). In 1771, over 47 million pounds of tobacco were imported.However, the credit the Glaswegians extended to American tobacco farmers would backfire. The debts incurred by the tobacco farmers – which included future presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (who almost lost his farm as a result) – grew, and were among the grievances when the American War of Independence came in 1775. That war destroyed the tobacco trade for the Glaswegians. Much of the money that was owed to them was never repaid. Many of their plantations were lost. But the Glaswegians were entrepreneurial and they adapted. They moved on to other businesses, particularly cotton.By the 19th century, all sorts of local industry had emerged around the goods traded in the city. It was producing and exporting textiles, chemicals, engineered goods and steel. River engineering projects to dredge and deepen the Clyde (with a view to forming a deep- water port) had begun in 1768 and they would enable shipbuilding to become a major industry on the upper reaches of the river, pioneered by industrialists such as Robert Napier and John Elder. The final stretch of the Monkland Canal, linking the Forth and Clyde Canal at Port Dundas, was opened in 1795, facilitating access to the iron-ore and coal mines of Lanarkshire.The move to fossil-fuelled shipping in the latter 19th century destroyed the advantages that the trade winds had given Glasgow. But it didn't matter. Again, the people adapted. By the turn of the 20th century the Second City of the British Empire had become a world centre of industry and heavy engineering. It has been estimated that, between 1870 and 1914, it produced as much as one-fifth of the world's ships, and half of Britain's tonnage. Among the 25,000 ships it produced were some of the greatest ever built: the Cutty Sark, the Queen Mary, HMS Hood, the Lusitania, the Glenlee tall ship and even the iconic Mississippi paddle steamer, the Delta Queen. It had also become a centre for locomotive manufacture and, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, could boast the largest concentration of locomotive building works in Europe.It was not just Glasgow's industry and wealth that was so gargantuan. The city's contribution to mankind – made possible by the innovation and progress that comes with booming economies – would also have an international impact. Many great inventors either hailed from Glasgow or moved there to study or work. There's James Watt, for example, whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. One of Watt's employees, William Murdoch, has been dubbed ‘the Scot who lit the world' – he invented gas lighting, a new kind of steam cannon and waterproof paint. Charles MacIntosh gave us the raincoat. James Young, the chemist dubbed as ‘the father of the oil industry', gave us paraffin. William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, developed the science of thermodynamics, formulating the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature; he also managed the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.The turning point in the economic fortunes of Glasgow – indeed, of industrial Britain – was WWI. Both have been in decline ever since. By the end of the war, the British were drained, both emotionally and in terms of capital and manpower; the workers, the entrepreneurs, the ideas men, too many of them were dead or incapacitated. There was insufficient money and no appetite to invest. The post-war recession, and later the Great Depression, did little to help. The trend of the city was now one of inexorable economic decline.If Glasgow was the home of shipping and industry in 19th-century Britain, it became the home of socialism in the 20th century. Known by some as the ‘Red Clydeside' movement, the socialist tide in Scotland actually pre-dated the First World War. In 1906 came the city's first Labour Member of Parliament (MP), George Barnes – prior to that its seven MPs were all Conservatives or Liberal Unionists. In the spring of 1911, 11,000 workers at the Singer sewing-machine factory (run by an American corporation in Clydebank) went on strike to support 12 women who were protesting about new work practices. Singer sacked 400 workers, but the movement was growing – as was labour unrest. In the four years between 1910 and 1914 Clydebank workers spent four times as many days on strike than in the whole of the previous decade. The Scottish Trades Union Congress and its affiliations saw membership rise from 129,000 in 1909 to 230,000 in 1914.20The rise in discontent had much to do with Glasgow's housing. Conditions were bad, there was overcrowding, bad sanitation, housing was close to dirty, noxious and deafening industry. Unions grew quite organically to protect the interests of their members.Then came WWI, and inflation, as Britain all but abandoned gold. In 1915 many landlords responded by attempting to increase rent, but with their young men on the Western front, those left behind didn't have the means to pay these higher costs. If they couldn't, eviction soon followed. In Govan, an area of Glasgow where shipbuilding was the main occupation, women – now in the majority with so many men gone – organized opposition to the rent increases. There are photographs showing women blocking the entrance to tenements; officers who did get inside to evict tenants are said to have had their trousers pulled down.The landlords were attacked for being unpatriotic. Placards read: ‘While our men are fighting on the front line,the landlord is attacking us at home.' The strikes spread to other cities throughout the UK, and on 27 November 1915 the government introduced legislation to restrict rents to the pre-war level. The strikers were placated. They had won. The government was happy; it had dealt with the problem. The landlords lost out.In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, more frequent strikes crippled the city. In 1919 the ‘Bloody Friday' uprising prompted the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to deploy 10,000 troops and tanks onto the city's streets. By the 1930s Glasgow had become the main base of the Independent Labour Party, so when Labour finally came to power alone after WWII, its influence was strong. Glasgow has always remained a socialist stronghold. Labour dominates the city council, and the city has not had a Conservative MP for 30 years.By the late 1950s, Glasgow was losing out to the more competitive industries of Japan, Germany and elsewhere. There was a lack of investment. Union demands for workers, enforced by government legislation, made costs uneconomic and entrepreneurial activity arduous. With lack of investment came lack of innovation.Rapid de-industrialization followed, and by the 1960s and 70s most employment lay not in manufacturing, but in the service industries.Which brings us to today. On the plus side, Glasgow is still ranked as one of Europe's top 20 financial centres and is home to some leading Scottish businesses. But there is considerable downside.Recent studies have suggested that nearly 30% of Glasgow's working age population is unemployed. That's 50% higher than that of the rest of Scotland or the UK. Eighteen per cent of 16- to 19-year-olds are neither in school nor employed. More than one in five working-age Glaswegians have no sort of education that might qualify them for a job.In the city centre, the Merchant City, 50% of children are growing up in homes where nobody works. In the poorer neighbourhoods, such as Ruchill, Possilpark, or Dalmarnock, about 65% of children live in homes where nobody works – more than three times the national average. Figures from the Department of Work and Pensions show that 85% of working age adults from the district of Bridgeton claim some kind of welfare payment.Across the city, almost a third of the population regularly receives sickness or incapacity benefit, the highest rate of all UK cities. A 2008 World Health Organization report noted that in Glasgow's Calton, Bridgeton and Queenslie neighbourhoods, the average life expectancy for males is only 54. In contrast, residents of Glasgow's more affluent West End live to be 80 and virtually none of them are on the dole.Glasgow has the highest crime rate in Scotland. A recent report by the Centre for Social Justice noted that there are 170 teenage gangs in Glasgow. That's the same number as in London, which has over six times the population of Glasgow.It also has the dubious record of being Britain's murder capital. In fact, Glasgow had the highest homicide rate in Western Europe until it was overtaken in 2012 by Amsterdam, with more violent crime per head of population than even New York. What's more, its suicide rate is the highest in the UK.Then there are the drug and alcohol problems. The residents of the poorer neighbourhoods are an astounding six times more likely to die of a drugs overdose than the national average. Drug-related mortality has increased by 95% since 1997. There are 20,000 registered drug users – that's just registered – and the situation is not going to get any better: children who grow up in households where family members use drugs are seven times more likely to end up using drugs themselves than children who live in drug-free families.Glasgow has the highest incidence of liver diseases from alcohol abuse in all of Scotland. In the East End district of Dennistoun, these illnesses kill more people than heart attacks and lung cancer combined. Men and women are more likely to die of alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow than anywhere else in the UK. Time and time again Glasgow is proud winner of the title ‘Fattest City in Britain'. Around 40% of the population are obese – 5% morbidly so – and it also boasts the most smokers per capita.I have taken these statistics from an array of different sources. It might be in some cases that they're overstated. I know that I've accentuated both the 18th- and 19th-century positives, as well as the 20th- and 21st-century negatives to make my point. Of course, there are lots of healthy, happy people in Glasgow – I've done many gigs there and I loved it. Despite the stories you hear about intimidating Glasgow audiences, the ones I encountered were as good as any I've ever performed in front of. But none of this changes the broad-brush strokes: Glasgow was a once mighty city that now has grave social problems. It is a city that is not fulfilling its potential in the way that it once did. All in all, it's quite a transformation. How has it happened?Every few years a report comes out that highlights Glasgow's various problems. Comments are then sought from across the political spectrum. Usually, those asked to comment agree that the city has grave, ‘long-standing and deep-rooted social problems' (the words of Stephen Purcell, former leader of Glasgow City Council); they agree that something needs to be done, though they don't always agree on what that something is.There's the view from the right: Bill Aitken of the Scottish Conservatives, quoted in The Sunday Times in 2008, said, ‘We simply don't have the jobs for people who are not academically inclined. Another factor is that some people are simply disinclined to work. We have got to find something for these people to do, to give them a reason to get up in the morning and give them some self-respect.' There's the supposedly apolitical view of anti-poverty groups: Peter Kelly, director of the Glasgow-based Poverty Alliance, responded, ‘We need real, intensive support for people if we are going to tackle poverty. It's not about a lack of aspiration, often people who are unemployed or on low incomes are stymied by a lack of money and support from local and central government.' And there's the view from the left. In the same article, Patricia Ferguson, the Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Maryhill, also declared a belief in government regeneration of the area. ‘It's about better housing, more jobs, better education and these things take years to make an impact. I believe that the huge regeneration in the area is fostering a lot more community involvement and cohesion. My real hope is that these figures will take a knock in the next five or ten years.' At the time of writing in 2013, five years later, the figures have worsened.All three points of view agree on one thing: the government must do something.In 2008 the £435 million Fairer Scotland Fund – established to tackle poverty – was unveiled, aiming to allocate cash to the country's most deprived communities. Its targets included increasing average income among lower wage-earners and narrowing the poverty gap between Scotland's best- and worst-performing regions by 2017. So far, it hasn't met those targets.In 2008 a report entitled ‘Power for The Public' examined the provision of health, education and justice in Scotland. It said the budgets for these three areas had grown by 55%, 87% and 44% respectively over the last decade, but added that this had produced ‘mixed results'. ‘Mixed results' means it didn't work. More money was spent and the figures got worse.After the Centre for Social Justice report on Glasgow in 2008, Iain Duncan Smith (who set up this think tank, and is now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) said, ‘Policy must deal with the pathways to breakdown – high levels of family breakdown, high levels of failed education, debt and unemployment.'So what are ‘pathways to breakdown'? If you were to look at a chart of Glasgow's prosperity relative to the rest of the world, its peak would have come somewhere around 1910. With the onset of WWI in 1914 its decline accelerated, and since then the falls have been relentless and inexorable. It's not just Glasgow that would have this chart pattern, but the whole of industrial Britain. What changed the trend? Yes, empires rise and fall, but was British decline all a consequence of WWI? Or was there something else?A seismic shift came with that war – a change which is very rarely spoken or written about. Actually, the change was gradual and it pre-dated 1914. It was a change that was sweeping through the West: that of government or state involvement in our lives. In the UK it began with the reforms of the Liberal government of 1906–14, championed by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, known as the ‘terrible twins' by contemporaries. The Pensions Act of 1908, the People's Budget of 1909–10 (to ‘wage implacable warfare against poverty', declared Lloyd George) and the National Insurance Act of 1911 saw the Liberal government moving away from its tradition of laissez-faire systems – from classical liberalism and Gladstonian principles of self-help and self-reliance – towards larger, more active government by which taxes were collected from the wealthy and the proceeds redistributed. Afraid of losing votes to the emerging Labour party and the increasingly popular ideology of socialism, modern liberals betrayed their classical principles. In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George said ‘the partisan warfare that raged around these topics was so fierce that by 1913, this country was brought to the verge of civil war'. But these were small steps. The Pensions Act, for example, meant that men aged 70 and above could claim between two and five shillings per week from the government. But average male life- expectancy then was 47. Today it's 77. Using the same ratio, and, yes, I'm manipulating statistics here, that's akin to only awarding pensions to people above the age 117 today. Back then it was workable.To go back to my analogy of the prologue, this period was when the ‘train' was set in motion across the West. In 1914 it went up a gear. Here are the opening paragraphs of historian A. J. P. Taylor's most celebrated book, English History 1914–1945, published in 1965.I quote this long passage in full, because it is so telling.Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state, who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913–14, or rather less than 8% of the national income.The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries,from working excessive hours.The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman's food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the Second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.Since the beginning of WWI , the role that the state has played in our lives has not stopped growing. This has been especially so in the case of Glasgow. The state has spent more and more, provided more and more services, more subsidy, more education, more health care, more infrastructure, more accommodation, more benefits, more regulations, more laws, more protection. The more it has provided, the worse Glasgow has fared. Is this correlation a coincidence? I don't think so.The story of the rise and fall of Glasgow is a distilled version of the story of the rise and fall of industrial Britain – indeed the entire industrial West. In the next chapter I'm going to show you a simple mistake that goes on being made; a dynamic by which the state, whose very aim was to help Glasgow, has actually been its ‘pathway to breakdown' . . .Life After the State is available at Amazon, Apple Books and all good bookshops, with the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

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Good Sunday morning to you,I am just on a train home from Glasgow, where I have been gigging these past two nights. I've had a great time, as I always seem to do when I go north of the wall.But Glasgow on a Saturday night is something else. My hotel was right next to the station and so I was right in the thick of it. If I ever get to make a cacatopian, end-of-days, post-apocalyptic thriller, I'll just stroll through Glasgow city centre on a Friday or Saturday night with a camera to get all the B roll. It was like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting only with a Scottish accent. Little seems to have changed since I wrote that infamous chapter about Glasgow in Life After the State all those years ago. The only difference is that now it's more multi-ethnic. So many people are so off their heads. I lost count of the number of randoms wandering about just howling at the stars. The long days - it was still light at 10 o'clock - make the insanity all the more visible. Part of me finds it funny, but another part of me finds it so very sad that so many people let themselves get into this condition. It prompted me to revisit said chapter, and I offer it today as your Sunday thought piece.Just a couple of little notes, before we begin. This caught my eye on Friday. Our favourite uranium tech company, Lightbridge Fuels (NASDAQ:LTBR), has taken off again with Donald Trump's statement that he is going to quadruple US nuclear capacity. The stock was up 45% in a day. We first looked at it in October at $3. It hit $15 on Friday. It's one to sell on the spikes and buy on the dips, as this incredible chart shows.(In other news I have now listened twice to the Comstock Lode AGM, and I'll report back on that shortly too). ICYMI here is my mid-week commentary, which attracted a lot of attentionRight - Glasgow.(NB I haven't included references here. Needless to say, they are all there in the book. And sorry I don't have access to the audio of me reading this from my laptop, but, if you like, you can get the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops. The book itself available at Amazon, Apple Books et al).How the Most Entrepreneurial City in Europe Became Its SickestThe cause of waves of unemployment is not capitalism, but governments …Friedrich Hayek, economist and philosopherIn the 18th and 19th centuries, the city of Glasgow in Scotland became enormously, stupendously rich. It happened quite organically, without planning. An entrepreneurial people reacted to their circumstances and, over time, turned Glasgow into an industrial and economic centre of such might that, by the turn of the 20th century, Glasgow was producing half the tonnage of Britain's ships and a quarter of all locomotives in the world. (Not unlike China's industrial dominance today). It was regarded as the best-governed city in Europe and popular histories compared it to the great imperial cities of Venice and Rome. It became known as the ‘Second City of the British Empire'.Barely 100 years later, it is the heroin capital of the UK, the murder capital of the UK and its East End, once home to Europe's largest steelworks, has been dubbed ‘the benefits capital of the UK'. Glasgow is Britain's fattest city: its men have Britain's lowest life expectancy – on a par with Palestine and Albania – and its unemployment rate is 50% higher than the rest of the UK.How did Glasgow manage all that?The growth in Glasgow's economic fortunes began in the latter part of the 17th century and the early 18th century. First, the city's location in the west of Scotland at the mouth of the river Clyde meant that it lay in the path of the trade winds and at least 100 nautical miles closer to America's east coast than other British ports – 200 miles closer than London. In the days before fossil fuels (which only found widespread use in shipping in the second half of the 19th century) the journey to Virginia was some two weeks shorter than the same journey from London or many of the other ports in Britain and Europe. Even modern sailors describe how easy the port of Glasgow is to navigate. Second, when England was at war with France – as it was repeatedly between 1688 and 1815 – ships travelling to Glasgow were less vulnerable than those travelling to ports further south. Glasgow's merchants took advantage and, by the early 18th century, the city had begun to assert itself as a trading hub. Manufactured goods were carried from Britain and Europe to North America and the Caribbean, where they were traded for increasingly popular commodities such as tobacco, cotton and sugar.Through the 18th century, the Glasgow merchants' business networks spread, and they took steps to further accelerate trade. New ships were introduced, bigger than those of rival ports, with fore and aft sails that enabled them to sail closer to the wind and reduce journey times. Trading posts were built to ensure that cargo was gathered and stored for collection, so that ships wouldn't swing idly at anchor. By the 1760s Glasgow had a 50% share of the tobacco trade – as much as the rest of Britain's ports combined. While the English merchants simply sold American tobacco in Europe at a profit, the Glaswegians actually extended credit to American farmers against future production (a bit like a crop future today, where a crop to be grown at a later date is sold now). The Virginia farmers could then use this credit to buy European goods, which the Glaswegians were only too happy to supply. This brought about the rise of financial institutions such as the Glasgow Ship Bank and the Glasgow Thistle Bank, which would later become part of the now-bailed-out, taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).Their practices paid rewards. Glasgow's merchants earned a great deal of money. They built glamorous homes and large churches and, it seems, took on aristocratic airs – hence they became known as the ‘Tobacco Lords'. Numbering among them were Buchanan, Dunlop, Ingram, Wilson, Oswald, Cochrane and Glassford, all of whom had streets in the Merchant City district of Glasgow named after them (other streets, such as Virginia Street and Jamaica Street, refer to their trade destinations). In 1771, over 47 million pounds of tobacco were imported.However, the credit the Glaswegians extended to American tobacco farmers would backfire. The debts incurred by the tobacco farmers – which included future presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (who almost lost his farm as a result) – grew, and were among the grievances when the American War of Independence came in 1775. That war destroyed the tobacco trade for the Glaswegians. Much of the money that was owed to them was never repaid. Many of their plantations were lost. But the Glaswegians were entrepreneurial and they adapted. They moved on to other businesses, particularly cotton.By the 19th century, all sorts of local industry had emerged around the goods traded in the city. It was producing and exporting textiles, chemicals, engineered goods and steel. River engineering projects to dredge and deepen the Clyde (with a view to forming a deep- water port) had begun in 1768 and they would enable shipbuilding to become a major industry on the upper reaches of the river, pioneered by industrialists such as Robert Napier and John Elder. The final stretch of the Monkland Canal, linking the Forth and Clyde Canal at Port Dundas, was opened in 1795, facilitating access to the iron-ore and coal mines of Lanarkshire.The move to fossil-fuelled shipping in the latter 19th century destroyed the advantages that the trade winds had given Glasgow. But it didn't matter. Again, the people adapted. By the turn of the 20th century the Second City of the British Empire had become a world centre of industry and heavy engineering. It has been estimated that, between 1870 and 1914, it produced as much as one-fifth of the world's ships, and half of Britain's tonnage. Among the 25,000 ships it produced were some of the greatest ever built: the Cutty Sark, the Queen Mary, HMS Hood, the Lusitania, the Glenlee tall ship and even the iconic Mississippi paddle steamer, the Delta Queen. It had also become a centre for locomotive manufacture and, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, could boast the largest concentration of locomotive building works in Europe.It was not just Glasgow's industry and wealth that was so gargantuan. The city's contribution to mankind – made possible by the innovation and progress that comes with booming economies – would also have an international impact. Many great inventors either hailed from Glasgow or moved there to study or work. There's James Watt, for example, whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. One of Watt's employees, William Murdoch, has been dubbed ‘the Scot who lit the world' – he invented gas lighting, a new kind of steam cannon and waterproof paint. Charles MacIntosh gave us the raincoat. James Young, the chemist dubbed as ‘the father of the oil industry', gave us paraffin. William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, developed the science of thermodynamics, formulating the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature; he also managed the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.The turning point in the economic fortunes of Glasgow – indeed, of industrial Britain – was WWI. Both have been in decline ever since. By the end of the war, the British were drained, both emotionally and in terms of capital and manpower; the workers, the entrepreneurs, the ideas men, too many of them were dead or incapacitated. There was insufficient money and no appetite to invest. The post-war recession, and later the Great Depression, did little to help. The trend of the city was now one of inexorable economic decline.If Glasgow was the home of shipping and industry in 19th-century Britain, it became the home of socialism in the 20th century. Known by some as the ‘Red Clydeside' movement, the socialist tide in Scotland actually pre-dated the First World War. In 1906 came the city's first Labour Member of Parliament (MP), George Barnes – prior to that its seven MPs were all Conservatives or Liberal Unionists. In the spring of 1911, 11,000 workers at the Singer sewing-machine factory (run by an American corporation in Clydebank) went on strike to support 12 women who were protesting about new work practices. Singer sacked 400 workers, but the movement was growing – as was labour unrest. In the four years between 1910 and 1914 Clydebank workers spent four times as many days on strike than in the whole of the previous decade. The Scottish Trades Union Congress and its affiliations saw membership rise from 129,000 in 1909 to 230,000 in 1914.20The rise in discontent had much to do with Glasgow's housing. Conditions were bad, there was overcrowding, bad sanitation, housing was close to dirty, noxious and deafening industry. Unions grew quite organically to protect the interests of their members.Then came WWI, and inflation, as Britain all but abandoned gold. In 1915 many landlords responded by attempting to increase rent, but with their young men on the Western front, those left behind didn't have the means to pay these higher costs. If they couldn't, eviction soon followed. In Govan, an area of Glasgow where shipbuilding was the main occupation, women – now in the majority with so many men gone – organized opposition to the rent increases. There are photographs showing women blocking the entrance to tenements; officers who did get inside to evict tenants are said to have had their trousers pulled down.The landlords were attacked for being unpatriotic. Placards read: ‘While our men are fighting on the front line,the landlord is attacking us at home.' The strikes spread to other cities throughout the UK, and on 27 November 1915 the government introduced legislation to restrict rents to the pre-war level. The strikers were placated. They had won. The government was happy; it had dealt with the problem. The landlords lost out.In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, more frequent strikes crippled the city. In 1919 the ‘Bloody Friday' uprising prompted the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to deploy 10,000 troops and tanks onto the city's streets. By the 1930s Glasgow had become the main base of the Independent Labour Party, so when Labour finally came to power alone after WWII, its influence was strong. Glasgow has always remained a socialist stronghold. Labour dominates the city council, and the city has not had a Conservative MP for 30 years.By the late 1950s, Glasgow was losing out to the more competitive industries of Japan, Germany and elsewhere. There was a lack of investment. Union demands for workers, enforced by government legislation, made costs uneconomic and entrepreneurial activity arduous. With lack of investment came lack of innovation.Rapid de-industrialization followed, and by the 1960s and 70s most employment lay not in manufacturing, but in the service industries.Which brings us to today. On the plus side, Glasgow is still ranked as one of Europe's top 20 financial centres and is home to some leading Scottish businesses. But there is considerable downside.Recent studies have suggested that nearly 30% of Glasgow's working age population is unemployed. That's 50% higher than that of the rest of Scotland or the UK. Eighteen per cent of 16- to 19-year-olds are neither in school nor employed. More than one in five working-age Glaswegians have no sort of education that might qualify them for a job.In the city centre, the Merchant City, 50% of children are growing up in homes where nobody works. In the poorer neighbourhoods, such as Ruchill, Possilpark, or Dalmarnock, about 65% of children live in homes where nobody works – more than three times the national average. Figures from the Department of Work and Pensions show that 85% of working age adults from the district of Bridgeton claim some kind of welfare payment.Across the city, almost a third of the population regularly receives sickness or incapacity benefit, the highest rate of all UK cities. A 2008 World Health Organization report noted that in Glasgow's Calton, Bridgeton and Queenslie neighbourhoods, the average life expectancy for males is only 54. In contrast, residents of Glasgow's more affluent West End live to be 80 and virtually none of them are on the dole.Glasgow has the highest crime rate in Scotland. A recent report by the Centre for Social Justice noted that there are 170 teenage gangs in Glasgow. That's the same number as in London, which has over six times the population of Glasgow.It also has the dubious record of being Britain's murder capital. In fact, Glasgow had the highest homicide rate in Western Europe until it was overtaken in 2012 by Amsterdam, with more violent crime per head of population than even New York. What's more, its suicide rate is the highest in the UK.Then there are the drug and alcohol problems. The residents of the poorer neighbourhoods are an astounding six times more likely to die of a drugs overdose than the national average. Drug-related mortality has increased by 95% since 1997. There are 20,000 registered drug users – that's just registered – and the situation is not going to get any better: children who grow up in households where family members use drugs are seven times more likely to end up using drugs themselves than children who live in drug-free families.Glasgow has the highest incidence of liver diseases from alcohol abuse in all of Scotland. In the East End district of Dennistoun, these illnesses kill more people than heart attacks and lung cancer combined. Men and women are more likely to die of alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow than anywhere else in the UK. Time and time again Glasgow is proud winner of the title ‘Fattest City in Britain'. Around 40% of the population are obese – 5% morbidly so – and it also boasts the most smokers per capita.I have taken these statistics from an array of different sources. It might be in some cases that they're overstated. I know that I've accentuated both the 18th- and 19th-century positives, as well as the 20th- and 21st-century negatives to make my point. Of course, there are lots of healthy, happy people in Glasgow – I've done many gigs there and I loved it. Despite the stories you hear about intimidating Glasgow audiences, the ones I encountered were as good as any I've ever performed in front of. But none of this changes the broad-brush strokes: Glasgow was a once mighty city that now has grave social problems. It is a city that is not fulfilling its potential in the way that it once did. All in all, it's quite a transformation. How has it happened?Every few years a report comes out that highlights Glasgow's various problems. Comments are then sought from across the political spectrum. Usually, those asked to comment agree that the city has grave, ‘long-standing and deep-rooted social problems' (the words of Stephen Purcell, former leader of Glasgow City Council); they agree that something needs to be done, though they don't always agree on what that something is.There's the view from the right: Bill Aitken of the Scottish Conservatives, quoted in The Sunday Times in 2008, said, ‘We simply don't have the jobs for people who are not academically inclined. Another factor is that some people are simply disinclined to work. We have got to find something for these people to do, to give them a reason to get up in the morning and give them some self-respect.' There's the supposedly apolitical view of anti-poverty groups: Peter Kelly, director of the Glasgow-based Poverty Alliance, responded, ‘We need real, intensive support for people if we are going to tackle poverty. It's not about a lack of aspiration, often people who are unemployed or on low incomes are stymied by a lack of money and support from local and central government.' And there's the view from the left. In the same article, Patricia Ferguson, the Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Maryhill, also declared a belief in government regeneration of the area. ‘It's about better housing, more jobs, better education and these things take years to make an impact. I believe that the huge regeneration in the area is fostering a lot more community involvement and cohesion. My real hope is that these figures will take a knock in the next five or ten years.' At the time of writing in 2013, five years later, the figures have worsened.All three points of view agree on one thing: the government must do something.In 2008 the £435 million Fairer Scotland Fund – established to tackle poverty – was unveiled, aiming to allocate cash to the country's most deprived communities. Its targets included increasing average income among lower wage-earners and narrowing the poverty gap between Scotland's best- and worst-performing regions by 2017. So far, it hasn't met those targets.In 2008 a report entitled ‘Power for The Public' examined the provision of health, education and justice in Scotland. It said the budgets for these three areas had grown by 55%, 87% and 44% respectively over the last decade, but added that this had produced ‘mixed results'. ‘Mixed results' means it didn't work. More money was spent and the figures got worse.After the Centre for Social Justice report on Glasgow in 2008, Iain Duncan Smith (who set up this think tank, and is now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) said, ‘Policy must deal with the pathways to breakdown – high levels of family breakdown, high levels of failed education, debt and unemployment.'So what are ‘pathways to breakdown'? If you were to look at a chart of Glasgow's prosperity relative to the rest of the world, its peak would have come somewhere around 1910. With the onset of WWI in 1914 its decline accelerated, and since then the falls have been relentless and inexorable. It's not just Glasgow that would have this chart pattern, but the whole of industrial Britain. What changed the trend? Yes, empires rise and fall, but was British decline all a consequence of WWI? Or was there something else?A seismic shift came with that war – a change which is very rarely spoken or written about. Actually, the change was gradual and it pre-dated 1914. It was a change that was sweeping through the West: that of government or state involvement in our lives. In the UK it began with the reforms of the Liberal government of 1906–14, championed by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, known as the ‘terrible twins' by contemporaries. The Pensions Act of 1908, the People's Budget of 1909–10 (to ‘wage implacable warfare against poverty', declared Lloyd George) and the National Insurance Act of 1911 saw the Liberal government moving away from its tradition of laissez-faire systems – from classical liberalism and Gladstonian principles of self-help and self-reliance – towards larger, more active government by which taxes were collected from the wealthy and the proceeds redistributed. Afraid of losing votes to the emerging Labour party and the increasingly popular ideology of socialism, modern liberals betrayed their classical principles. In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George said ‘the partisan warfare that raged around these topics was so fierce that by 1913, this country was brought to the verge of civil war'. But these were small steps. The Pensions Act, for example, meant that men aged 70 and above could claim between two and five shillings per week from the government. But average male life- expectancy then was 47. Today it's 77. Using the same ratio, and, yes, I'm manipulating statistics here, that's akin to only awarding pensions to people above the age 117 today. Back then it was workable.To go back to my analogy of the prologue, this period was when the ‘train' was set in motion across the West. In 1914 it went up a gear. Here are the opening paragraphs of historian A. J. P. Taylor's most celebrated book, English History 1914–1945, published in 1965.I quote this long passage in full, because it is so telling.Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state, who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913–14, or rather less than 8% of the national income.The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries,from working excessive hours.The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman's food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the Second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.Since the beginning of WWI , the role that the state has played in our lives has not stopped growing. This has been especially so in the case of Glasgow. The state has spent more and more, provided more and more services, more subsidy, more education, more health care, more infrastructure, more accommodation, more benefits, more regulations, more laws, more protection. The more it has provided, the worse Glasgow has fared. Is this correlation a coincidence? I don't think so.The story of the rise and fall of Glasgow is a distilled version of the story of the rise and fall of industrial Britain – indeed the entire industrial West. In the next chapter I'm going to show you a simple mistake that goes on being made; a dynamic by which the state, whose very aim was to help Glasgow, has actually been its ‘pathway to breakdown' . . .Life After the State is available at Amazon, Apple Books and all good bookshops, with the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

This episode starts on Saturday when I go to make a small pick up at a casino. And ends early Monday morning when I finally get home. Most of the episode is on Sunday. I played seven casinos Sunday, making money at every stop. Just when I thought the wedding was over I had a nice big win to finish off my day.

Speaker: Sr. Pastor Richard ParksScripture: 2 Kings 4:8-11Objective: A woman in 2 Kings 4 made room for the prophet Elisha, showing great faith. God rewarded her with a son, and later brought him back to life through Elisha. The message teaches us to make room for God and trust Him fully.

Hello and Good Sunday from LA! Mit vielen positiven Vibes begrüßen die Flaschenkinder aus LA und Wien. Heute mit den mega tollen Cider von Klaar Fruchtfermente https://www.klaar-fruchtfermente.de/ https://www.viniculture.de/Produzent-innen/Deutschland/Klaar-Fruchtfermente/?srsltid=AfmBOorIqMKP4O4vT1BCPpINR2ZngV-0RUTFsY6_GlJuxo9Wyp-lfz6d

In this special sermon on this special day, BELIEVING's tenth birthday, we look ahead to our calling to live here for good, in this season and every season, for God's glory and other's good.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/playme and get on your way to being your best self. Underdog Promo Code: PLAYME Signup Link: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-play-me-or-fade-me Support the Show/Community Best Bet Newsletter: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/playmeorfademe/membership Today's Card: Play 1: NFL Dallas Cowboys +7 vs. Houston Texans (+100) Play 2: NFL Dalton Schultz Over 2.5 receptions (-125) Play 3: CBB McNeese -2.5 vs. North Texas (-115) Play 4: CBB Cal St Fullerton +1.5 vs. Idaho State (-112) Play 5: CBB Southern Illinois -6.5 vs. North Dakota State (-120) Play 6: CBB Montana +17.5 at Utah State (-102) Play 7: NHL Edmonton/Montreal 1P Over 1.5 (-145) YTD Results - Active: NFL Props: 44-20 (68.8%), up 20.2887 units College Basketball: 47-37, (55.9%), up 5.4178 units PGA Golf: 55-47 (53.9%), up 3.5389 units NFL Totals: 2-2 (50.0%), down 0.3217 units NFL Parlays: 0-1 (0%), down 1 unit NBA Sides: 4-6, (40.0%), down 2.3468 NFL Sides: 30-32 (48.4%), down 5.0005 units NBA Prop Bets: 8-11, (42.1%), down 4.1009 units NHL: 12-18, (40.0%), down 8.4111 units College Football: 68-82 (46.1%), down 20.5535 units College Basketball 2-point or less record vs. spread: 5-3, 63% @KotaCapperKyle Results - Active: Other: 31-29, 51.7%, up 1.3273 units CBB: 2-2, 50%, up 0 units Action - CFB Futures: Minnesota Over 5.5 wins (+100) - currently 6-4 **WINNER Virginia Tech Over 8 (-130) - currently 5-5 *LOSER South Florida Over 7 (-150) - currently 5-5 Sam Houston Over 4.5 (-125) - currently 8-2 **WINNER Colorado State Over 6 (-145) - currently 7-3 **WINNER Texas State Over 8 (-135) - currently 6-4 Podcast Accomplishments: NFL Prop Bets: 57.3% in 2023, up 23.1609 units 2024 CBB: Won 58.0722 units 2024 NBA Prop Bets: Won 33.92773 units NFL Football: Hit 60.2% in the 2022 NFL Regular Season Longest Winning Streak - 13 days in February 2024, 61-23, 72.6%, up 30.7103 units (all 1-unit bets) NFL Prop Bets: 62.8% in 2021 NFL Football: 57.7% winning over 100 bets in 2021 MLB Baseball Team Totals: 213-159, 57.2%, won 44.37 units in 2022 Contact Me: X: @MrActionJunkie1 Email: mractionjunkie@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Romans 7:7-12 The post Transformed by Truth: Session 33 – Righteous and Good (Sunday Morning Service) appeared first on SOUTHSIDE BAPTIST CHURCH.

Listen to a message from Emmanuel Baptist Church of Longview, TX.Support the show

Welcome back to The Round 12 MOTIVATIONAL MASTERY Podcast Show! Episode #137 “BY ANY MEANS!” …The Malcolm X Speech and Ossie Davis Eulogy! Good Sunday morning to everyone who decided to check in on the Round 12 Podcast again today. Last week's episode was a presentation of the famous Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a Dream Speech.” When I decided to present this important historical speaking event, I felt it wouldn't be complete without appropriate credit and recognition to one of the most important change agents the United States and the world has ever known… Malcolm X! This, his 1964 speech at the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), was the beginning of the end for him. Shortly after this event he was assassinated while speaking in the same building. Included in the episode are the words of his Eulogy, spoken originally by the illustrious actor and activist, Mr. Ossie Davis. Yes, there are many of us who heard about or saw the Spike Lee Movie called, Malcolm X, which received rave reviews… but even after all these years, this man Malcolm X is still one of the most misunderstood, revered and simultaneously reviled men of all time. So, I felt compelled to give this African American man, his fair and equitable moment here with me on my humble journey. My hope and my goal are to take historical perspectives like these and learn from them, so I can continue to do my part to Make Our World a Better Place to Live In. Wish me luck! …And as always, I wish you Peace. BE SURE TO CLICK THE ATTACHED LINK TO SEE OUR DETAILED INFORMATIONAL EMAIL OR TO SUBSCRIBE: https://conta.cc/3NpLS1e Intro & Outro Music Provided by... Soul II Soul, Song: "Keep on Movin'!" Musical Guest, Donny Hathaway. Song: “To Be Young Gifted and Black!” Contributing thoughts & perceptions: Malcolm X, AKA El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and his speech excerpt from the “Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. www.blackpast.org, African-American History Speeches, and public domain photo by Marion S. Trikosko, Courtesy of Library of Congress (2003688131).

Good Sunday afternoon to you,I was blown away by the response to Wednesday's article about weight loss. The Twitter/X summary got more than 10 million views. Here it is, in case you missed it. Going forward, I am thinking of writing more alternative health stuff, as there seems to be a huge appetite for it. But today it's business as usual: gold. And I have a question for you …The Great Steppe stretches approximately 5,000 miles from the Pacific coast of China through Mongolia, Siberia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Romania, reaching the Danube Delta and Hungary.Vast stretches of grassland, savanna, and shrubland—harsh and dry, devoid of trees and large vegetation—are sandwiched between forests to the north and mountains and deserts to the south. This region has connected Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, and South Asia since the Paleolithic Age, serving as a predecessor to the Silk Road and the Eurasian land bridge.This ocean of grass is one of the world's largest ecosystems. Many remarkable species—elk, gazelle, brown bear, leopard, and tiger—have made it their home. So have many great nomadic empires—the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Huns, and the Göktürk Khaganate—all famous for their ferocity, horsemanship, and military might.The open space gives rise to mighty extremes of weather—howling winds, unbearable heat by day, and freezing cold by night. Humans could only survive by breeding creatures—goats, sheep, camels, and cattle—even hardier than themselves. Of all of these, perhaps the most essential to human survival and evolution was the horse.The horse was first domesticated on the Steppe about 6,000 years ago, probably by the Botai people in present-day Kazakhstan. Their horses—likely similar to today's Mongolian horse—were small, stocky, and hardy, able to travel long distances in trying conditions. The horse enabled tribes to guide their flocks over large distances as they searched for new grazing lands. It facilitated trade and exchange, and allowed them to form huge and terrifying armies.The fearsome Scythians were the first to use horses in battle, carrying stones, clubs, and bows as weapons. These marauding armies inspired fear. Their warriors were such brilliant horsemen that it seemed they and their horses were one creature, giving rise to the Greek myth of the centaur: wild, untamed, and violent; strong, fast, and ferocious; drunken, lawless, and lustful, with the upper body of a man and the lower body of a horse.The Greeks had a complicated relationship with the Scythians, both admiring and fearing them. Chiron, one of the centaurs famous for his wisdom and knowledge of medicine, tutored many of the greatest Greek heroes, including Hercules, Achilles, and Jason. Perhaps the Greeks exaggerated their barbarity to contrast it with their own sophistication and culture.In any case, while the centaur has endured in myth, it was not long before it was realized that man and beast were not one, and the practice of horse-riding spread beyond the Great Steppe. The horse became the primary mode of land transport for thousands of years.You really should subscribe.Then the Industrial Revolution came along. The first steam locomotive was developed in England in 1804. By the mid-19th century, railroads had become the primary mode of transportation for people and goods across much of the world. It was the beginning of the end for horses as a primary mode of transportation.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the automobile emerged. “Horseless carriages,” they were called. Karl Benz developed the first gasoline-powered car in 1885. By the early 1900s, cars had become a common sight on many roads, further diminishing the need for horses.Inventor Alexander Winton sought investment for his Winton Motor Carriage Company. “Get a horse!” a banker told him. “You're crazy if you think this fool contraption you've been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse.”Winton continues:“From my pocket, I took a clipping from the New York World of November 17, 1895, and asked him to read it. He brushed it aside. I insisted. It was an interview with Thomas A. Edison: ‘Talking of horseless carriages suggests to my mind that the horse is doomed… Ten years from now you will be able to buy a horseless vehicle for what you would pay today for a wagon and a pair of horses. The money spent in the keep of the horses will be saved and the danger to life will be much reduced.'”The banker threw back the clipping and snorted, “Another inventor talking.”Today, the horse is, for the most part, an expensive luxury. Its use is often just symbolic.How does this relate to goldHere is my question:Could you say the same about gold?The horse was transport for 6,000 years. It was transport for almost as long as gold was official money. It was “natural transport.”But just as transport changes as technology evolves, so does money.Perhaps gold is to money as the horse is to transport?Something to ponder this Sunday afternoon.(SPOILER: I don't think it is!)Tell your friends about this amazing article. As from later this week I will be at the Edinburgh Fringe, performing Shaping the Earth, a “lecture with funny bits” about the history of mining. I'm then taking the show to London on October 9th and 10th to the Museum of Comedy. Please come if you fancy a bit of “learning and laughter”. The Edinburgh link is here. And the London link is here.Plus:Charlie Morris is one of my closest mates and he writes what I think is one of the best investment newsletters out there, in fact a suite of them. I urge you to sign up for a free trial. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Join us for a special message from Pastor Alan and a powerful time of sharing stories and testimonies at Reynolda Church! Today, as we share stories and testimonies, we celebrate the rich history that has brought us to this moment while eagerly anticipating the journey ahead.

Good Sunday!Enjoy this shiur discussing Halachik Dilemmas during the Holocaust. Please feel free to share with your family and friends #holocaust #yomhashoah #holocaustmemorialday #jew #jewish #torah #torahfortoughtimes #rabbiroodyn #bringthemhome #rabbi #torahanytime #Judaism #Israel #shiur #responsetotragictimes

Good Sunday morning to you,I am putting back my promised piece on gold miners until mid-week, so keep a look out for that. Meanwhile, Life After the State - Why We Don't Need Government (2013), my first book, and many readers' favourite, which fell out of print last year, is now, thanks to the invaluable help of my new buddy Chris P, back in print (Amazon, Apple Books), with the audiobook here (Audible, Apple Books). I'm very proud of the some of the reviews it had - “A brilliant book,” Steve Baker; “A must read,” Merryn Somerset Webb; “Something extraordinary,” James Harding; “Incredibly readable", Al Murray and so on.But, as is often the way, my favourite review came from a “random on the internet”, an Amazon reviewer: “The most important book I have read in a long time. I've just bought five extra copies, and plan to force it on all I meet, in the manner of a Jehovah's Witness.” :)Today, for your Sunday morning thought piece, I thought I'd publish a short extract. I hope you enjoy it.(First edition paper backs are now trading hands, by the way, for over £200. No hardbacks for sale - so all those who helped fund it back in the day, if you've still got your copy it's worth something).In the 1990s, when I was in my twenties, I was mad about Latin America. I loved the people, the tropical weather, the forests, the mountains, the beaches, the language, the ancient history – and I was nuts about the music. All I wanted to do was go there and have adventures. Every year I would catch a cheap Boxing Day flight and come back at the beginning of February. I went to all sorts of wonderful places: Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Honduras and, in 1996, Cuba.This wasn't at the height of Cuban repression. Fidel Castro was still president and the very worst of the poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was now behind it. But the country was still desperately poor.Havana was an amazing place, full of contrasts. The only cars were either huge American classics – symbols of booming 1950s USA that looked like something off the set of Back to the Future – or dour and bleak Ladas that had been imported from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s, symbolic of the Cold War and communism. There were magnificent Art Deco or Art Nouveau buildings, yet there'd be a hole in the roof, or part of it had fallen down. There were pro-Castro symbols and slogans everywhere you looked, but the walls on which they were painted would be crumbling. The entire city looked like it needed re-rendering.After one obligatory, over-priced night in a government hotel, I found a room in a Havana apartment belonging to a well-educated Cuban family. Luis was a political economist and a professor, no less; Celia was a doctor. They had three young children: two girls and a boy.I had gone to Cuba with preconceived notions about what an amazing place it was. Any problems it had were entirely due to sanctions and other American punishments, I thought. It had the best health service in the world, the best education in the world and was a shining example to the greedy West on how things could be run. I don't know where I got those ideas from – conversations at university, probably – but Luis quickly put me right.‘What is the point of a great hospital, if there is no medicine?' he would whisper to me. ‘What is the point of great schools when you have no paper?' I didn't have an answer.I say whisper. Criticism, even indoors, was always whispered. Many Cubans would loudly declare how wonderful the regime was, surreptitiously look about to check no potential informant was in earshot, then come up close and whisper, ‘I hate Castro' – or something along those lines. So oppressive was the regime that paranoia, secrets, denial and deception permeated every area of life. People didn't dare to be honest. They were too scared of what the repercussions might be.Some Cuban friends of mine in London had told me before I left, ‘You need dollars. You can't buy anything with pesos.' I was a pretty intrepid explorer in those days and dismissed this advice. I thought I'd be able to get off the beaten track into the real Cuba, where I could use pesos like real Cubans. But my friends were right. You couldn't. There was, simply, nothing available to buy with pesos. There were no shops or businesses that accepted pesos, except the odd street stall that sold ice cream or bits of cooked dough, loosely described as pizza. Cubans got their bread and other essentials with ration books and a lot of queuing.Western goods did exist. Clothing, electrical and hardware goods, and food and drink – Havana Club rum, beer, cheese and cured meats, for example – were sold in grey, colourless supermarkets. The supermarkets were not at all cheap and, despite the fact that they were state-run, would only accept US dollars – one of the many hypocrisies I would encounter.So the only way anyone could buy anything was with US dollars at a state-run store. However, most people were employed by the government in some way or other, and paid in Cuban pesos. So how did they get dollars?The answer was: from tourists.Luis and Celia got their dollars renting out a room to people like me. Most Cubans didn't have the option of an apartment with three bedrooms. (Luis's parents had somehow managed to avoid it being expropriated.) Some were lucky enough to have the use of a car and could be taxi drivers. But this was another option that was only available to a tiny few – there was no manufacture of cars and no import trade. You, or more likely your parents, would have somehow had to have acquired a car way back when, and kept hold of it. There were a few restaurants and bars scattered about, and a tiny, well-connected elite could become waiters. Where did that leave everyone else?As an economist and a doctor, you'd expect Luis and Celia to be a fairly wealthy couple. And by Cuban standards they earned good salaries – about 500 pesos a month each. The official exchange rate was one peso to the dollar, thus they earned the equivalent of $500. The unofficial rate, however – the real market rate – was 20:1, so Luis and Celia's 500 pesos amounted to about $25. A pair of jeans in the supermarket cost twice that. But, remember, you couldn't actually buy anything with pesos.One night's rent from me was more money than Luis, with a PhD, would earn in an entire month. A taxi driver might land that figure in two or three fares. On a good night, a waiter might earn that in tips. But the big money was in selling sex. If she found a generous boyfriend, a prostitute – a ‘jinetera', as they were called – could earn many times that in one night.More than any of the other European nations, it was Italy that seemed to have caught the Cuba bug. My flight out was full of Italians. All over Havana there were Italians. They loved Cuba. I naively thought it might have to do with the historical links between Italy and communism, but wandering around Havana I soon saw another reason. The Italian men loved the black Cuban women – and vice versa, it seemed. Everywhere you looked you'd see stylish Italian men arm in arm with young Cuban black girls, their paid girlfriends for the two weeks they spent there.Cuban men were selling their bodies too. A rather plump Greek- English woman I knew in her late forties married a beautiful (yes, beautiful) man – a ‘jinetero' – at least 25 years her junior. I had to deliver some money to him for her. I was amazed when I met him. He looked like a young Sidney Poitier. She looked like a chubby, middle- aged Bette Midler. A most unlikely couple.In some cases, I've no doubt, couples fell in love. Marriages and families may have resulted. Cuba is a famously sexual country. I expect that many of the jineteras derived some occasional pleasure from their work. But, in most cases, the reality was rather more dark and sinister. Their economic circumstances meant that these people felt they had no other option but prostitution, if they wanted to improve their lot.It's hard to believe just how widespread ‘jineterismo' was, and probably still is. There has been no formal study, but anecdotally it appears that more than 50% of Cuban women below 50 have practised prostitution at some stage – if not with a tourist, then with another Cuban.‘Everyone is jinetera,' said Luis. ‘Look around. Everyone. Jinetero, jinetera. Look what Fidel has done to our country. Look what he has done to our people'.We were sitting on the Malecón – the wall which runs along the Havana sea front – watching good-looking jineteros and jineteras attempting to snare a tourist. Of all the Latin American countries I visited, I found I had the most intense conversations in Cuba. This was one of them. I transcribed it into my diary later that night. ‘I don't want my children to be a doctor like their mother, or a political economist like me. What is the point? MD, PhD, a month's work and I cannot buy a pair of shoes.' Luis continued: ‘Useless life. A much better life for my son is if he is a taxi driver or a waiter. Then he can get dollars. Maybe he can get a tourist to fall in love with him. And my daughters? I tell you a secret. I pray my daughters will be beautiful. Every father does. So they can have tourist boyfriends, have money, maybe marry a tourist, and get out of here. That is why every Cuban father wants his daughter to be a jinetera. Jinetera – that is the best life you can have here, that is how you survive, that is how you escape. Thank you, Fidel!'I don't know what the motivation behind Castro's great revolution was or why he and his cohorts made the economic and political choices they did – lust for power, political idealism, or, maybe, just to get rid of Batista. It seems his decision to ally himself with the Soviet Union was, at least initially, more of a reaction to US aggression and sanctions than any deep Marxist sentiment. I very much doubt their intention was the eventual consequence: a society so imbalanced and distorted that taxi drivers and uneducated young people could earn, in one night, many times more than a professor, a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer might earn in a month; where the large majority of young girls in Havana were selling their bodies for dollars, and where every Cuban father wanted his daughter to be a jinetera.Cuba was probably my first lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences. And my story illustrates many of the themes of this book: the power of the state; how the state interferes in people's lives; how political decisions, often made out of expediency, even if benevolent, can have such grave and unexpected repercussions; why the freedom to trade and exchange is so important; and how, if you limit that freedom, you limit people's possibilities.The useless peso, moreover, was my first experience of how essential a properly functioning system of money is to a society, and what can happen when politicians start to use money as a political tool.Life After the State is available at Amazon, Apple Books and all good bookshops, with the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops.Until next time,DominicPS If you missed my report into buying gold, it is here:(Any issues downloading the PDF, please reply to this email or try this link). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

The week kicks off with St. Patrick's Day on the 17th!! GET YOUR IRISH ON!!!! Monday Morning with Shonda will feature another of her "Author Highlight" Interviews with author George Ellis, MD. It's going to be a GOOD TIME!! The week looks to be filled with a bunch of fun Holidays so let the Good Times Roll!! Have a Good Sunday and we'll see all of you next week!!! Later Gators!!! Get everything you need to start your own successful podcast on Podbean here: https://www.podbean.com/tomspodcastPBFree   Visit our webpage where you can catch up on Current / Past Episodes: www.theoldmanspodcast.com     Contact us at: theoldmanspodcast@gmail.com

Good Sunday morning to you,We have a pot pourri of offerings for you today. First, I posted the above sketch on Twitter yesterday and it struck a nerve. I thought you might also enjoy it on here. It's eight years since I recorded it, but it is still as apposite as ever.In other, more serious news, I met with Campbell Smyth, Chairman of Fitzroy Minerals (FTZ.V), yesterday, and we have a long old chinwag about the state of the mining and metals markets. You can listen to that interview here or on your podcast app:Trees of LifeAnd, finally, my buddy Mark O'Byrne, formerly of Irish bullion dealer, Goldcore, got in touch about his new and rather beautiful coins: Trees of Life, they are known as, and they are available in both gold (0.1 oz and 1 oz) and silver (silver 1 oz). He sent me a couple of the silver ounce coins to review and they are really rather beautiful. Here is a pic:Let me help out a mate and give them a little plug.On one side is the Tree of Life, a symbol, common to many religions and mythologies, not least Celtic and Nordic, of balance, fertility, wisdom and strength. On the other side is the Rising Sun, symbolising dawn, a new day, new beginnings and the end of darkness. There is the Harp, Éire's sacred musical instrument and national emblem. (Ireland is the only nation in the world that has a musical instrument as its national emblem - bet you didn't know that). And there is the Tri Spiral. This spiral is carved onto a large stone at the back of the tomb of Newgrange, one of Ireland (and indeed the Earth's) oldest and most sacred places, thought to pre-date both Stonehenge and the Pyramids.You can find out more about these coins, likely, I would have thought, to become collectors' items at Tara Coins. With St Patrick's Day little more than a week away, these should make lovely gifts. Order yours at any of:* GoldBank in Ireland* Merrion Gold in Ireland* Bullion By Post in the UK* APMEX in the US* Bullion By Post in the US  * Celtic Gold in Germany: Enjoy your Sunday,Dominic This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday morning to you,Today's piece is all about decision-making and the decline of family in the west.Before I crack on, I just wanted to flag a couple of things.Wearing my comedy hat, I'm taking An Evening of Curious Songs on a mini tour in the spring - shows in London (Crazy Coqs), Somerset, Surrey, Essex and Hampshire. Tickets make great Christmas pressies, so please take a look.And my new album, It's ALL True, is out. CDs also make great Christmas pressies for errant uncles, so check that out too in the DF shop.So to today's piece - Why so many bad decisions?I've recently been looking at my family tree on one of those ancestry websites, and I was amazed to see just how big some of the families were in 19th and early 20th Century England. Having nine or 10 brothers and sisters was not unusual.Today, families are much smaller. All sorts of reasons have been proffered for that. Matt Ridley argues that families get smaller as people grow wealthier and live longer. In poorer countries, you might have lots of children, knowing that a significant number will not make it through pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood, let alone the teenage years. With the longer safer lives we now have in the west, you can have two or three kids and know that the likelihood is that they will make it safely to adulthood. Stat of the day: in 1850, life expectancy in Britain was 40 for men and 42 for women. Today it is double that. Be grateful you are alive in Britain today - you get to live twice as long.But when parents themselves are asked why they don't have more children, the most commonly given reason is cost. People ca no't afford to have more kids. The biggest expense of bringing up a child - government aside (the state takes half of everything you will ever earn) - is somewhere to live. We can no longer afford to buy the large homes our Victorian ancestors built to house their families, so just putting a roof over their head is problem enough. I've written endlessly about house prices being a function of cheap, debt-based, fiat money, and it's quite easy to, therefore, attribute declining family size to fiat.The average cost of raising a child to 18 is now over two hundred grand. Add in school fees and you can double that number. To age 18, you say. Most kids now stay at home well into their 20s. If you look at who has big families today, it is most unusual to see an ordinary middle-class family with five or more kids. It tends to be only the very rich, who can afford it, the very poor, who get state aid and thus can also afford it (especially if housing is covered), or the very religious. On that note, my friend Simon Evans argues, and I'm paraphrasing, that we have smaller families because religion has died. One primary purpose of religion is to get you to reproduce, he suggests. Without religion egging us on, many of us will take the sex, but we might forego the added burden of having to bring up the ensuing children.There's probably something to all of these explanations. But, whatever the cause, families have got much, much smaller. That is indisputable.My parents divorced when I was just a few months old. I hardly saw my father at all when I was young due to various court rulings, and that led him to set up an organisation called Families Need Fathers. He wrote about his divorce at great length and to considerable acclaim. My mother worked and I went to boarding school. So I never grew up with lots of brothers and sisters or a big family. It's a life I've never known, without wishing to sound sad, one I've always wanted and wished for. How I would love to have been one of HE Bates' Darling Buds of May (I imagine we all would, though tral life is never as idyllic as fiction).I only ever knew one of my grandparents, the other three died either before or shortly after I was born. That's that life expectancy thing again. So I'm always quite envious when I see, for example, those Asian families with several generations - nanny and grandad, mum and dad and the kids, and perhaps even their kids - all living under the same roof. I know it's crowded, but it's also kind of idyllic, particularly if you have a big enough house. When I travelled round Latin America, I adored those large Spanish Colonial homes built around a courtyard. Different parts of the family could occupy different apartments, so they had some privacy, but at the same time they were always close together.I once to listened to an audiobook about willpower and decision-making. I'm afraid I can't remember the name. (This always happens to me with kindle and audiobooks. You don't look at the cover every time you open it to remind you, so you forget what it is you are reading or listening to). Nevertheless, the author argued that we make different decisions when we are being monitored. For example, if you believe in God and you believe God is all-seeing, the decisions you make will be informed by that. You will be less likely to sin, for example, if you think God is watching. The same applies to CCTV. Similarly, if you have a large family about you, they monitor and look after you, you are answerable to them, secrets are harder to keep, and that informs the decisions you make. This is, especially, the case when choosing a partner. Old school families will even have made that choice for you - and they will have often looked for different qualities than you might look for. They are bound, for example, to be thinking more about the long-term good of the family, stability, family alliance, the likely durability of the relationship, the sort of characteristics in a partner that might be good for you - that kind of thing - rather than hotness factor, which might be your main priority, certainly as a young person. Broadly speaking, a decision taken by someone with a strong family infrastructure around them , where brother, sister, mum, dad, uncle, aunt, nan and grandad all have some input, and so their cumulative wisdom is all added, is, more often than not, going to be a better decision than one made by somebody with no family around them .As you know, the Great Decline of Britain and Western Europe is something that preoccupies me a great deal. I wonder how it is so many bad decisions seem to be made at every level of society, particularly at the top. And such short term decisions too. (I'm not saying I only make good decisions, by the way. I make bad ones. Lots of them). But I would like to venture a possible explanation: the decline of family. We make more bad decisions without the added wisdom that comes with the infrastructure of family around us. If you extrapolate that from the personal all the way up through society to a national level, the same dynamic is in place.So the tentative conclusion of this article is this: the decline of family has led to worse decision-making at every level of society.How now to explain the decline of family?I blame high house prices. And I blame high house prices on fiat. Therefore: fiat leads to bad decision making at every level of society.And, by the way, I'm sure declining family size also explains the west's inability to defend itself, its culture and and its history.The Flying Frisby is made possible by you, the reader. Please consider becoming a subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Good Sunday morning to you,Last week's thought piece on the inexorable rise of the Far Right has become my most read Substack ever. Check it out, if you haven't already.Today we continue on a similar theme.Enjoy!I'm currently working on a new book about gold, and, as gold often leads to war - or is it the other way round? - I've found myself reading rather a lot about conquerors and conquest. There are certain things all conquerors do, from invade to plunder to strip the conquered of their wealth, power, history and identity. What is so bizarre about today in Britain and Western Europe is that we are doing all these things to ourselves, voluntarily. Let me explain.As the armies of Alexander the Great marched east, overpowering all who stood in their way to form probably the first great empire the world had ever known and, in terms of land mass, one of the biggest (even to this day), the annihilation of the cultural identities of those they conquered soon followed. Locals were raped, pillaged, subjugated and enslaved. Coinage was a far more important tool of propaganda then than it is now, and Alexander had his armies confiscate gold and silver bullion everywhere they went; melt it down and then re-struck with Greek gods: Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; Nike, goddess of Victory; Zeus, god of power; and Heracles, god of strength, portrayed in the likeness of Alexander himself (at this point rulers had not yet started depicting their own heads). Conquered people quite literally had their own history and legend struck off. Alexander's coins meanwhile were standardised throughtout his empire.As well as “Romanizing” the Celts - imposing Roman language, law, custom and governance on them - the Romans actively persecuted Celtic druids and destroyed their sacred groves. After William I conquered Britain, he took Anglo-Saxon land and gave it to his cronies; he imposed heavy taxes, strict laws and a new kind of feudal system; he replaced Anglo-Saxon English with Norman French in the courts and other centres of rule; he made ecclesiastical changes to better control the church. Any kind of rebellion met with swift and ruthless repression. Even if 1,000 years later, World War Two was not so different. Both the Nazis and the Japanese did everything in their power to strip those they conquered of their cultural identity.As well as possession of land and confiscation of wealth, the annihilation of local history, myth, hero and legend has always been a tool of the conqueror, part of the suppression and subjugation that follows invasion.  Even today the US, not technically an empire and forever trying to distance itself from anything imperial, nevertheless controls much of the globe and its prime resource, oil, with its military. It also exports its culture in such a domineering way that everyone else confuses their own history with that of the US. Like its military, American cultural narratives dominate the world, and distort everybody else's. You would think, for example, that there had never been any slavery in history, except for that in America, in the 200 years from when the nation was formed to its outlawing in 1865, never mind that the British outlawed it 2 generations earlier. In fact, slavery has existed since before civilization began and still goes on today, with some 21 to 45 million trapped in it. In just seven years between 1938 and 1945, Germany enslaved a number equivalent to 400 years of Transatlantic Slave Trade. Include Japan and the number is double. American cultural narratives dominate.But here is what is so weird about what is happening today, under the rudderless leadership that is representative social democracy. In the past if you wanted to occupy the lands of other people, you would have to conquer them and take their lands by force. Today no such force is required. In fact, in Britain, Tony Blair actually legislated for it. So did Boris Johnson. Not only do we import our own invasion, we actually subsidise it. The £8 million a day spent housing illegal migrants in hotels is just one example of this.Once imported, we then start re-writing our own history or apologising for it; from positive discrimination in the media to invisible casting (for some but not all) we change of our stories to better represent these new people, both at the expense of the locals and opportunity for them and at the expense of truth.Here, for example, is what, according to the BBC, an English family in Roman Britain looked like. The latest nuts example from the BBC. The plague was clearly racist. With headlines like that, we satirists are being put out of a job.We all know about the anti-white middle-aged man narrative of recent years - pale, male and stale and all that - and the discrimination he now encounters when attempting to find work. We have all seen how the modern British family is represented in advertising: there is, it seems, no such thing as a non-multi-cultural family. The latest evolution is anti- young, blonde women. I know this because my partner works in advertising. There is now a widespread agenda not to have them in adverts.It is not even the immigrants to this country who are actively stripping us of our history and thus cultural identity (with a few exceptions). We are doing it to ourselves. I won't say voluntarily, because there are a lot of people who don't want this to happen, but such is the system of rule we have in place, with state-planned everything and the mindset of the state and most institutions dominated by one worldview, anyone who opposes may as well howl at the moon. A king would represent his people. He can make decisions quickly. His decisions, when they come, are acted upon. With representative democracy every decision is seemingly made with short-term headlines in mind, and rarely legacy. Decisions are often so contested the resulting legislation is watered down, or undermined by the Blob enacting it. Much of the time there is no decision at all because of the imagination required or the career risk of putting your head above the parapet. We are no longer one people with one common memory. We are a splodge, a mishmash of different cultural identities with, following the death of Christianity, no coherent ideology at its core beyond the new religions of climate change, multi-culturalism (whatever that means) and the NHS. It is a system bereft of thought for the future, bereft of strategy and long-term planning of any kind. The Victorians thought with legacy in mind. They built for the future. Today we do no such thing. We build with nothing in mind but short-term profit and the satisfaction of arbitrary building regulations. This will not change until we change our system of rule. The simplest, most bloodless way to do this is to change our systems of money and tax. You design a society the way you tax it. We must have independent money that no body has the power to create at no cost to itself. A non-bloodless alternative - in other words some kind of violent revolution - is not possible, because the state is armed and you, the citizen, are not. This mismatch dooms not just the UK but all of Western Europe. There will not be a revolution.What's more, the state - the police and the media especially - does not treat people equally, something former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, articulated to her cost. So I fear for anyone who does revolt.Those who come here do not have the same history as us. They do not have the same experience or collective memory, the same shared values, the same background or the same heritage. Theirs may be superior. Theirs may be inferior. It does not matter. The point is they do not feel the same allegiance or the same loyalties. They do not have the same values or the same goals, nor should we expect them to. They do not come here to be British. They come here to seek their fortune. That is quite natural. That is what people do. That does not mean we need to sacrifice ourselves.We are doing the conquerors' job to ourselves.I sometimes think that China with its lofty ambitions of world dominance must look at the west, and, every time it is thinking of doing something, then think, “Actually no, we don't need to do anything here. The west is destroying itself by itself”. Keir Starmer is doing the same looking at the Conservatives. The hundreds of thousands that are coming to the UK each year are doing the same looking at us. And we are powerless to do anything about it.It makes me sigh. And more.Watch this post in video form. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

In this episode we discuss the possibility of another QB transfer to Georgia Southern. Also we discuss the Atlanta Falcons ending that 3 game losing streak. Twitter: @VFBaller Website: https://firstandframerates.com/ Rumble Link: https://rumble.com/c/c-1395352 Discord: https://discord.gg/nY4aVn2Res CashApp: VFBaller20 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/virtualfootballer Anchor: https://anchor.fm/firstandframerates Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6u9mcoMwrukvGtU9b5D1GZ?si=sqeN_6flTWqN-X9vZjJ0gA&utm_source=copy-link Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-and-framerates-show/id1438776797 Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy81OWQ4M2VlNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw?ep=14

Hour 1: Chris and Steve discus the officials from the Bills and Jets game

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Grammi gives us the week ahead report!! Have an AWESOME week ahead!!! Program Note: Thursday and Friday we are not having any LIVE Shows!! WE are taking the Thanksgiving weekend off!!!!! Have a Good Sunday and we'll see you Monday!!! Later Gators!!!   Get everything you need to start your own successful podcast on Podbean here: https://www.podbean.com/tomspodcastPBFree   Visit our webpage where you can catch up on Current / Past Episodes: www.theoldmanspodcast.com     Contact us at: theoldmanspodcast@gmail.com

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Episode #20: Good Sunday morning Sports Junkies, In this broadcast we cover a wide array of topics as the MLB 2023 Trade Deadlines is quickly approaching and Andy and I give our thoughts and Analysis as to what team's will be Sellers at the deadline compared to the Teams that are vying for post season play and will look to be Buyers. We give insight into the Start of NFL training camps as The NY Jets will Appear on Hard Knocks in 2023, Broncos head coach Sean Payton causes friction with the NY Jets and it critical of Nathaniel Hackett, Saleh Responds! Sequan Barkley re-ups with the NY Giants for one season as he signs an $11 Million Dollar contract. The World Cup is entertaining as the USA Women's Team looks to make a big run. Some College Football teams are leaving conferences and moving to others, plus entertaining chatter and banter. Thanks to everyone for the continued support and remember to spread the word about Passionate Sports Talk for the Hardcore Fan! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kevin-wolfe6/message

The Lord is Good - Sunday Morning 06-18-23

Good Sunday morning Los Angeles! Join us for the 6am one hour replay. Pour a cup of Klappuccino with a bagel and cream cheese and ease into the early Sunday morning with Doc as his theme this morning is language of wildlife in sports, art and surgery. Doc welcomed nature expert Nate Johnson who talks about growing up in Berkeley with hippie parents, his childhood in Nevada City, his interest in nature and his daughter reawakening his love for the outdoors. Plus, Doc homemade strawberry jam. Yumme!

Good Sunday morning Los Angeles! Join us for the 6am one hour replay. Pour a cup of Klappuccino and ease into the early Sunday morning with Doc as his theme this morning is juniors in sports, art and surgery. Doc welcomed guest El Tarasco's Ricardo Palomo who talked about the creation of the Junior Super Deluxe, their secret guacamole recipe along with their celebrity clientele. Plus, Doc assist Weekend Warriors with their questions on their aches and pains.

Good Sunday morning Los Angeles! Join us for the 6am one hour replay. Pour a cup of Klappuccino and ease into the early Sunday morning with Doc as his theme this morning is the Voice in sports, art and surgery. Doc welcomed sportscaster Brad Nessler who talked about his early influences, in particular Ray Scott, the Packers, his learned work ethic, prepping, voice care and more. Plus, how about a guava cream cheese croissant?

Good Sunday morning from the Outer Banks. The winds blowing across Ablemarle Sound are nearly always a loud and gigantic presence; you never feel alone. But this morning? All is calm. I can hear only the birds from where I am sitting, at a dining table covered with dozens of documents I've numbered 1 - 17 and lettered A - P, in the hopes that such organization and annotation will help me to stitch together what needs to be stitched. That, and/or I can accept the succor offered by Rick Rubin, in conversation with Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast: to consider, when we are creating work and trying to be perfect, that “everything we make, we're making as an offering to God. If you're making it for God, you're not taking any shortcuts.” It does not matter, or does not matter to me, whether you believe in God. The idea appeals!I am deeply fortunate to be staying in a 5-bedroom home (it's just me!) arranged by my friends Laura and Andy, who live next door. Here is the breakfast room:And here, a bit of that wind. I love it here so much.As mentioned in the audio, I have been extended this invitation because of a podcast, The Fifth Column to be exact, and the community of people that has grown around them in the past seven (!) years. These people include Laura and Andy, fans of the Fifth (and twenty year subscribers to Reason, where Matt Welch is editor-at-large). Back in 2021, my last scheduled stop of a 5,000-mile road trip was Miami, to see a live Fifth show, drive the guys to Key West, hang out for a few days, then zip home solo to NYC.I didn't have a place to stay on the trip's last leg, and I am not sure how it transpired, but Laura and Andy invited me to stay.with them. Their house is right on the Sound. I fell in love. I realize we often say that about places we visit, but let's just say, I can see spending time here…Which I did last night at Laura and Andy's, including with their friend Kim - ooh did we have a lot to talk about, including the move, happening even in Virginia, where Kim is a juvenile court judge, to get rid of cash bail entirely. Meaning, no matter what you do, stab me in the eye, run over my kid, the judge has the option to let you go free until trial. Having written about a case in which such a practice resulted in murder, I have a problem with repeatedly setting recidivistic violent felons free, a policy on which we will never all agree. Anyway! Also there last night was Andy's friend Sludge, a name given to him his first week in college after he drank the backwash from the keg bucket (or whatever that's called; I don't drink beer). Sludge is a former engineer who now works in healthcare, but what does he love more than anything? BAKING! I have never engaged in a conversation like this, the words were spilling (the margaritas helped), we talked T45 flour and canele pans; he ate some shortbread (Pie Talk #7) I'd brought as a hostess gift, he gave me English muffins he made here because, of course, he travels with his starter.The last person I spoke baking with was… drumroll please… Alison Roman. Anyone who's spent a few minutes here knows I am a super-fan of Roman's, that I bake her blueberry-cornmeal tart compulsively all summer (scroll down), that it was her tweet about induction ranges that convinced me to buy one. That she wound up at my apartment last month was… it was just right. We sat for several hours with a few others, talking media and eating a pie I'd made (of course I made her a pie, and no I still cannot recall what kind it was!), and when everyone else peeled off to the living room, she and I talked crusts, and cookbooks, and whose recipes work (hers, always) and whose sometimes do not. I wish there were a video of Roman making the salted chocolate pudding, but in lieu, let her tell you about her new book:As mentioned, I once owned more than 100 cookbooks. Alas, these were sold to Powell's when I left Portland, all that is but five: The Silver Palate Cookbook, which I rarely use and keep, maybe, for sentimental reasons, including a note I wrote in the back when I was a few months pregnant; New York Cookbook by Molly O'Neill, Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, in which I've tucked the handwritten thank you note Heatter sent me after I gave the book a nice review in Bon Appetit (I mean…), Tartine (are you sensing a dessert theme?), and How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, by Nigella Lawson, whose late-night snacking videos my daughter used to watch obsessively, to the point where she said, “I feel like she's another mom to me.” More moms, more snacking, what is not to like? I have not yet made Roman's a bowl of salted chocolate pudding so cannot tell you what I might change (likely nothing). I can tell you I learned, because she told me in the book's “Ingredients” introduction, to not add more salt to her recipes; that she's already done that, which is good for me to know as I almost always add more salt than called for; your cookies will thank you if you do. I can also tell you, her “Equipment” intro convinced me to get a kitchen scale, look, it's nine bucks. Because everyone has been so nice to me, and because the sky is right now pink, this Pie Talk is free for all. May you, as Roman suggests, eat the bowl of chocolate pudding communally with friends, “when the lights are low and the music is loud.” xx This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com/subscribe

after church lessons

2 Corinthians 5:1-11 "No Earthly Good", Sunday January 29th, 2023, Calvary Chapel Lowcountry, cclowcountry.org, https://youtube.com/live/ZLewwsOftyg

2 Corinthians 5:1-11 "No Earthly Good", Sunday January 29th, 2023, Calvary Chapel Lowcountry, cclowcountry.org, https://youtube.com/live/ZLewwsOftyg

A Purdy Good Sunday, Big 4 Hoops, and More - Monday Hour 1

In this episode, Taste Radio's hosts reflected on recent networking and live podcast events at BevNET's San Diego office and Super Coffee headquarters in Austin. They also addressed an often asked question from early-stage entrepreneurs and highlighted a few unusual products before Jacqui Brugliera took on one of the hottest of challenges. Show notes: 0:39: So Great To See You, Even For 10 Seconds. Support With Scaling. All Hell Breaks Loose. –  Ray admits to an issue with intros before the hosts chatted about conversations and connections from last week's meetup events. They also offered advice on scaling strategies, riffed on a marshmallow-flavored bourbon, functional spices and a new mood-centric beverage line. Later, Jacqui took on Paqui's one-chip challenge, eliciting sweat, tears and screams… among all the hosts. Brands in this episode: Paqui, Super Coffee, Marquis Beverage, Good Sunday, Recoup Wellness, Pocket Latte, Seoul Juice, Courtside Beverages, Somi Energy, Kimbala, Petit Pot, Shmallow, Spicewell, Kentucky 74, Vybes, Honey Mama's

The Mets needed a sweep and got one, but the Braves did as well and remain right on their heels. The Yankees avoided a sweep on Sunday thanks to Aaron Judge.

Good Sunday, Dayquillers! An extremely action packed Dungeons and Dragons episode is on your horizon today. This week on the Stoned's Realm, we are joined by a third player, Allison Reyes A.K.A. Ms. Reyes! *insert applause here* Ms. Reyes' character, Lory Story, joins Mr. Havlin and Mr. Shrader's characters, Ulladi and Daros, quest with Tiny and Thadius for justice and understanding. Lory has defected from Captain Kill-A-Few's crew to dismantle their organization with her knowledge of the Captain's crew. They journey across the street to one of the pirate strongholds in a boutique. They meet the quartermaster for an epic battle. Will Lory, Ulladi and Daros defeat the dreaded quartermaster? Will anyone help Tiny get home? Will anyone, and I mean anyone, slap Thadius in his scum face? Tune in to find out on this exciting episode of the Stoned's Realm Church of Xion Campaign!  

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