Posted on 01/23/2006 2:56:16 PM PST by Pokey78
I am tempted to use that failed bottlenose rescue as a metaphor for poor old Britain. By "bottlenose", I don't mean Charles Kennedy, although the Liberal Democrats' leadership race is not without its forlorn symbolism, too. Rather, like that whale, Britain is a magnificent creature, but looking ever more beached by the tides of history and floundering for a way back into safe waters.
For example, consider the following headline from the Scotsman the other week: "Teaching jobs in doubt as pensioners set to outnumber pupils by 2009."
This was a story by Peter MacMahon, the paper's "Scottish Government Editor", and it begins thus: "Scotland's demographic time bomb will explode in three years, when the number of pensioners north of the Border overtakes the number of children in school, the Executive has been warned."
Seems straightforward enough: the country's demographic death spiral is accelerating faster than expected. And, as far as the Scotsman is concerned, the alarming thing about this development is that it could put cushy state teaching jobs "in doubt".
For crying out loud, man, get a grip. It puts every job "in doubt". It puts the continued existence of your country "in doubt". And it means the Scottish National Party is going through the motions: nobody needs a Scottish nation if there are no more Scottish nationals. See you, Jimmeh? Not for much longer.
Indeed, the remarkable feature of contemporary Scottish nationalism is that it has achieved all the features of a failed nation state without achieving the status of a nation state. "Teaching jobs" are the least of it. And doubtless the unions will see to it that, even when there is only one wee scrawny bairn left in the whole of Scotland, platoons of teachers will still be manning abandoned elementary schools across the kingdom. The jobs-for-life public-sector employee stood on the burning deck whence all the boys had fled.
With half the annual births it had in the 1950s and a population on the brink of falling below five million, Scotland has become a minor member of the axis of extinction: Germany, Japan, Russia - once great nations now recording net population loss. In its general approach to economic reality, not to mention the physical health of its population, Scotland is closer to the Russian end of the picture than to the German-Japanese end.
How did this happen? Almost everywhere you go on the planet, the great institutions of this world were built by Scots, from the Canadian Pacific Railway to the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Where is the spirit of Mel McGibson in Braveheart?
"Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you'll live…at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take…OUR FREEDOM!"
But it is all more complicated than that. The modern Scot is prepared to fight - or, at any rate, strike - but only for the right to die in his bed on a government pension. In fact, one of the small signs of the country's woes is the byline of Peter MacMahon's Scotsman story. It is apparently possible to make a career in Scottish journalism as a "Scottish Government Editor", which in itself tells you something about the Scottish state.
What can be done to save Scotland? The Scottish Executive would like Scotland to have control of its own immigration, as the province of Quebec does. Quebec's collapsed birth rate has also cost it its dreams of nationhood and, like Scotland, it looked to immigration to save it, since when it has attracted a lively range of jihadist cells for whom Montreal offers the advantage of being a terrorist-indulgent neighbourhood only a stone's throw - or a bomb's - from the Great Satan's border. As the estate agents say, it is location, location, location. Glasgow has no such unique selling point.
Where are the immigrants going to come from? The birth rate is falling everywhere but the pre-modern world, ie, Africa and large swaths of Islam. Assuming that a talented Indian wished to leave his own land, which has the fastest-growing middle class in the world, why would he eschew America or Australia in order to go to Aberdeen and spend his working life supporting the elderly unsackable hordes of superfluous primary-school teachers?
The Muslims do their bit to keep the classrooms full. Abu Hamza, one notes, has seven children, all British subjects, although none inclined to go north, young man. But, in a world running out of emigrants, that is where any policy based on immigration leads: a future in which Scotland achieves nationhood as North Yemen.
Scotland is the canary in the United Kingdom's coal mine, but, given that three of the four component parts of the realm are mired in the same bloated, dead-end dependency culture, it would be foolish for the English to assume they won't get stuck with the bill for a Celtic fringe decaying into a long-term geriatric hospice. I doubt any Scot with an eye to electoral viability would want to run on anything that smacked of American conservatism, but surely they could at least learn something from Ireland, where, you will recall, Braveheart was filmed. They could have shot it in Scotland, but the Scots are too busy shooting themselves.
The other day Esko Aho - oh, come on, you remember, the former Finnish prime minister - presented a report to the European Commission that, in essence, read like a three-year-old Steyn column with an expenses budget: successful companies are abandoning the EU because it is becoming an irrelevant, sclerotic, statist backwater, etc.
Europe, says Mr Aho, is "living a moderately comfortable life on slowly declining capital. This society, averse to risk and reluctant to change, is in itself alarming, but it is also unsustainable in the face of rising competition from other parts of the world. For many citizens without work or in less-favoured regions, even the claim to comfort is untrue."
That is the point. On the present course, everywhere will wind up like Scotland. Mrs Thatcher liked to say that "the facts of life are conservative". Having declined to endorse that proposition in the Eighties, the Scots will be learning it far more painfully in the years ahead.
<< The one-man campaign to do away with punctuation, spelling and reason ... >>
Wow.
You cottoned on to that obnoxious pommy bastard and expressed your contempt for him in a sentence.
Good to note, among those whose native-born birth-rate has fallen to 1.3 births per woman, that my own assessment has not fallen on entirely barren ground.
Although I do detect a little tiny-trottered and dull-tusked attempt at pearl-trampling and prophet rending.
Blessings - Brian
We all know who you pretend to be Brian, and you're the typical Walter Mitty, some days a Yank, the next your a steadfast Aussie, then you come across as a supporter of the Jewish State, when pushed your a Kiwi. The truth is that you're an old IRA supporter, an Irishman born and bred, a full blown terrorist supporter pushing an outdated agenda to FR and anybody who'll listen for your Anti-British, sorry Anti-English, cause.
Your a fool and a dangerous fool at that or at the very best an idiot, that's why I'm forwarding your details (remember the MY America Pic - shudder) to HomeLand Security, the MI's, SO, Metro Police Anti Terrorist group and every British Regiment and Active Unit I can find, with your picture and some of your choice comments. If you profess to be who you are you'll run into someone in the Para's or Royal's who'll take offense to your vile comments, your not going to Heaven I guess.
Ta Ta
Yeah I know, I'll be banned but it's worth it.
,,, but our spelling and grammer is fwightfully better than yours.
You just lack talent and ability. It's almost third world sometimes.
,,, congratulations on those two well constructed sentences. You're not really qualified to sit in judgement in regard to anyone's talent and ability. Your opinions on any matters in this forum and on me are as out of whack as your spelling and grammar.
If I had an opinion of you you'd be another spud farmer trying to raise sheep. And I think that line drawing of you lacks talent and ability, it shows, trust me.
,,, yeah, right.
As it happens, I do hold an Irish passport. You're overestimating the depth of my interest in sheep though. I'm not at all surprised they're on your mind. Thank you for your concise analysis based on a line drawing. I'll treasure it - trust me.
[BRIAN: - PICTURES BEING GANGED UP ON BY MICHAEL CRAWFORD IN SOME MOTHERS DO HAVE 'EM AND IT AIN"T HALF HOT, MUM'S 'GLORIA BEAUMONT' - AND SHUDDERS]
You flatter yourself. I mix with Paras and Royal Marines every day and have for decades. Real Men. [None of whom - or his dog - you would either recognise or even know was up you unless he coughed - or barked]
No doubt its news to you but not all Limeys are envy-motivated, hatred-engined, rage-driven, pathologically-hesperophobic, illegitimate emasculated, feminized, homosexualized, serially-sodomized, illiterate, pack-running, cravenly-cowardly-terrorist-appeasing, bovver-booted habitual drunkards.
Just most of you.
And, on FR, recently, only two.
Not all Limeys, that is, may be counted among those mean-spirited cowards who, within the past century and a half, have been actually represented politically by only Hitler's arse-and-doormat-licker Chamerlain, [Whose only 'crime' was to have read and to represent his electorate] by the lying, looting, thieving, gangster-posing-as-a-politician, Atlee, by Once-FRee-British-Hong-Kong-surrenderer, Saddam-supporter and Hamas financier, Chris Patten - and by the "ira"-appeasing, British-sovereignty-surrendering, Cli'ton-cloned and co-Neo-Axis founder, Eurabian-terrorist-cause-advancing and Christian-Serbia invader, Tiny Blare.
Have a nice day.
Blessings - Brian
<]:^)~<
<< As it happens, I do hold an Irish passport. >>
Good on yah, shaggs. US Celts rule the world!
My son, who has just become an EU PR, poor fellow, lives in the Europeon Neo-Soviet offshore satellite state they still call 'England." [In which imported folks like him do all the work and create such wealth as momentarily exists before it is immediately confiscated and squandered by the fasciSSocialist state]
He is therefore, of course, even more than usual, in my prayers.
,,, your son has talent and mobility Brian. He'll be just fine. We both know that.
I have a feeling that all freepers are actually gossiping women, the type who sit there with pursed lips discussing someone saying oh isn't it bad they have fallen on hard times and lots of mock sympathy while secretly rubbing their hands before settling down into a good old bitch fest while tucking into a jumbo large size gut buster
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
<< ,,, your son has talent and mobility Brian. He'll be just fine. We both know that. >>
Of course he has and of course we do. And [Don't let on to any of FR's froth and foam flecked British bait-takers] I love visiting him, although a bit less this month than last as he just moved up to London, [Islamabad Lite] from Clifton Village, Bristol, one of my favorite spots on the planet. And where his place had a view of Brunel's beautiful bridge - and was an easy drive to Padstow and Rick Stein's place. [AKA 'Padstein'] Which is - after Doyles at Watson's Bay in Sydney - the world's second best fish and chip shop.
Good to see you have bit of a buy British beef you bastards bloviate there, Tony - but what about the meat of Mr Steyn's royal roasting?
We might have a bit of an exchange of frivolities, inanities and insults of a non-injurious nature - but Mr Steyn is as usual on to something wouldn't you say?
And/or haven't you, like the schoolteacher, made Mr Steyn's very point? "For crying out loud, man, get a grip. It puts every job 'in doubt.' It puts the continued existence of your country in doubt.'"
Mr Steyn is observing that Scotland is on track to at some future time achieving independence as North Yemen while the rest of what was once Great Britain is degenerating into being but the stamping grounds for God alone knows who and what.
And you're concerned that a few poo-stirrers made you feel like taking your marbles and going home?
Cheers, Mate - Brian
The problem is always getting the "snide" and "bastard" parts in synch... ;-)
Marky Boy What does a Canadian journalist, columnist, and film and theater critic really know about Scotland or England he should stick to the luvvie stuff whose sniffing what and whose poking who.
Baked Potato
Guess you summed it, eh, Cobber?
Anyone who upsets an Englishman's pathological denial of the dangerously degenerate state of his country is a Brit-basher or a Canadian lightweight?
OK then, RIP once great britain.
Have you learned Urdu, yet and Arabic? Better soon, I'd reckon. And make sure the kids start it young so they'll be able to understand during koran class at school - and get jobs at the kebabery - 'n stuff like that.
And you'd better get online to www.arabzon.co.uk for the Arabic words to the North Yemen's eunoch community's reminder of the way things used to be:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld Lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!
And there's a hand my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o thine
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang sine.
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld Lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!
How I would love to see some tough love for the folks in the Atlantic provinces. It would make the whole country stronger.
Guess Petitfour is right. Canary is a buzzword.
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