Mail Strike

The Royal Mail workers going on strike recently should carefully consider their future. They may well be jeapardising it with many businesses and individuals looking for alternatives to using the postal service. The mail workers have their grievances, but surely if they strike, then they are harming the British economy, as many businesses rely on the postal service for their turnover. They will surely find alternative ways of doing business if the Royal Mail is not available or is unreliable (more so than usual).

As the strikes continue, businesses will no longer want to rely on Royal Mail and so the Royal Mail will lose custom and have a smaller revenue, which in turn must lead to job cuts. The first people they should get rid of, when this happens (I believe it is inevitable, and the longer the strikes last, the more staff will have to be made redundant) should be those who were the most militant in their strike action.

The striking workers should be grateful they have a job and are not signing on at the local Job Centre. If they do not like the pay and conditions they should try living on benefits for a few weeks instead of a salary.

I have already cancelled paper statements on my current account in favour of online statements, something I previously resisted as I like to have a printed statement. But as the mail workers are just being stupid and nasty to their customers, I want to reduce, as much as possible, reliance on the Royal Mail.

So, Royal Mail workers, if you are afraid of losing your jobs and that's why you are striking, then get ready to lose your jobs as you ruin the business you work for.

Floods in England

For the past few weeks there has been terrible flooding in parts of England. This seems to have coincided with Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister of the UK, and not an easy situation for a new PM to deal with.

Here is a map of areas affected so far:

Hopefully the floods will soon come to an end, but I wonder if maybe this is a warning to the people of this country to change their ways before it is too late. The USA suffered terrible flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina paid a visit. These floods have not happened before in recent history, so something must be different that is causing this to happen.

Could it be that God is sending a warning to the people of the USA and UK (the descendants of ancient Israel, in part) to wake them up to their sins? Although it might remind us of Noah's Flood, a great worldwide flood like that will not happen again, but local floods may well continue.

Will the people of the USA and UK realise their sins and repent before it is too late? The Bible reveals that there will be a great tribulation at the end of this age before Christ returns to set up the Kingdom of God on earth.

For more on prophecy visit this site.

Metric is not so foreign, more English than the Imperial system

In a bit of a blow to those who want to cling on to good old British Imperial measures like pounds and ounces - it turns out it was an Englishman who invented the "foreign" metric system.

Or so claims Pat Naughtin, a metrication specialist from Australia, who carried out his research at Wadham College in Oxford, at Trinity College in Cambridge, and at the Royal Society in London.

He says John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, first published his ideas for a metric measure in 1668 → 120 years before the French adopted the metric system.

Wilkins' system was complete in that it was based on decimal numbers (10s, 100s, and 1000s) and its measurements were to be based on an internationally agreed 'universal measure', which would become the basis for other measures.

Our modern measuring methods now use all of Wilkins' ideas: we use prefixes to go from millimetres via metres to kilometres, we have a universally agreed definition of a metre, and a litre of water has a mass of a kilogram.

Although Wilkins did not use the word 'metre', its use became common after Tito Livio Burattini translated Wilkins 'universal measure' to its Italian equivalent, 'metro catholico' and, it seems that this was later translated, and shortened, to the French word, metre.

(From a Press Release issued by the UKMA)


Metric was invented by a good Christian bishop, rather than an atheist or someone of another religion. I have found that many well-meaning christian people have erroneously thought that imperial was better than metric and that God invented the imperial system. Yet the imperial system is almost totally pagan in its origins, whereas metric is christian.

“Bishop John Wilkins among other things:

• Was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
• Was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford.
• Married to Oliver Cromwell’s sister.
• Wrote “the first book in English on cryptography”.
• Was one of the Chief Founders of the Royal Society, the UK’s most important science academy.

Let’s hear it for rational polymathic Bishops who have no trouble reconciling a rational faith in a rational God with a rational outlook on the rational world.”

(Quoted from the Wardman Wire blog)

Further commentary can also be found at Metric Views.