Here’s this month’s round up of interesting and amusing quotes.
Since 2011, under David Cameron and Theresa May, life expectancy has flatlined. The latest figures, published by the Office for National Statistics in September, are for the period 2014-16. Women can now expect to live for 83.06 years and men for 79.40 years. For the first time in well over a century the health of people in England and Wales as measured by the most basic feature – life – has stopped improving. Just as Macmillan had done, the government initially tried to blame the figures on flu deaths. But as the years have passed and life expectancy continues to stall it has become clear that flu isn’t the culprit. The most plausible explanation would blame the politics of austerity, which has had an excessive impact on the poor and the elderly; the withdrawal of care support to half a million elderly people that had taken place by 2013; the effect of a million fewer social care visits being carried out every year; the cuts to NHS budgets and its reorganisation as a result of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act; increased rates of bankruptcy and general decline in the quality of care homes; the rise in fuel poverty among the old; cuts to or removal of disability benefits. The stalling of life expectancy was the result of political choice.
[Danny Dorling at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n22/danny-dorling/short-cuts]
Currently my pekin bantams get up around 11:30 and go to bed at 4:30. Between those times they eat, nap and chase crows. I fully approve of this approach to November.
[Emma Beddington, @BelgianWaffling]
37% of respondents in the UK said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. But people working in bullshit jobs need to do something. And that something is usually the production, distribution and consumption of bullshit.
[André Spicer in The Guardian, 23/11/2017]
As so often happens circumstances were not other than they were.
[PG Wodehouse, Company for Henry]
That on 7th July 17 Eliz. [1575], one Robert Lowes of Glawstrie co. Radnor, gent., Meredith ap Thomas ap Harry … Robert ap Griffithe ap Lewes, Robert William & Edward Smithe, in the company of one Sybell Lewes, wife of Jenn Lewes, Esq., “and also being very lighte, lewde, wylde, ryotous and disordered persons & common quarrellers”, with other evil disposed persons to the number of at least 40, being all armed with swords, etc., walked up and down the town of Huntington for three hours at least, espying some person to take revenge upon.
[AD Powell, “Abstracts from Miscellaneous Star Chamber Cases of the Radnor-Hereford Border”, Transactions Radnorshire Society, 35 (1965), 36-42]
The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
[Kurt Vonnegut]
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad.
[Alan Watts]
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.
[Seneca]
The next fear is that men will get so nervous that they’re going to be accused of harassment that they will simply stop hiring, meeting or socialising with female colleagues. There are reports this is already happening. We will get shut out of the room where important decisions are made because men fear our presence? How ironic would that be? …
The backlash fear [is] this could quickly become a vendetta in which lots and lots of men are implicated and punished. Men will be seen as the bad guys simply for the crime of being male.
Already men are nervously asking what’s acceptable and what’s not. Is all flirting now banned? Is a pat on the back OK, but a pat on the bottom always a sackable offence? This confusion could fast turn to anger.
The risk is that men, feeling under siege, kick back … Then we risk losing the support and sympathy of our male colleagues. We do indeed become seen as witch hunters, or worse, as witches. To be clear, men who have sexually abused and harassed women should be called out. But [a] backlash now against women would be the worst thing that can happen, it would shove this topic back under the carpet for years.
[Katty Kay at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42200092]
The problem is, unraveling the ultimate purpose of life, the universe, and everything may be forever beyond the reach of the human mind. I can’t know what the meaning of life is because the very nature of the meaning of life is unknowability. Knowing is a way of limiting things, yet the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is limitless.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/is-it-better-to-have-never-been-born/5654]
Gladstone … spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question …
The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
[WC Sellar, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England]
Not that it’s been a shit day, but I am left wondering why gin doesn’t come in Jeroboams.
[@ianvisits]
Statistics … suggest it is truly dismal these days to have a Y chromosome.
[Mark Rice-Oxley in The Guardian; 21/11/2017]
When he is in sycophancy mode rather than treachery mode, Mr Gove could give tutorials in how to be oleaginous to Uriah Heep.
[Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian; 10/12/2017]
This outbreak of delirium ought to make us extremely suspicious. Everyone cannot be happy. Someone is deluding themselves about what has been agreed – or they are trying to fool us.
[Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian; 10/12/2017]
Unless the GOP tax scam is being produced as a coloring book, Trump has NO idea what’s in it!
[Amy Siskind on Facebook; 19/12/2017]
More after the break!