SSPX, Scottish history, pictures of bare ladies

Crafty but dangerous tactics by the holy head person of the RC church, undoing the excommunications of SSPX and their archhenchperson Bishop Richard Williamson, the nutter who denies the Holocaust, to the great annoyance of the souls of 6m Jewish people.  Crafty, because it brings back into the RC communion some 140,000 souls, which can't be bad for the collection plate, but dangerous, because the creed of the Lefebvrists is so right-wing as to border on the fundamentalist, and we all know where that leads (a return to the Dark Ages, basically.) Surely there are better ways of getting bums back on pews? A good start might be to sell off some of the treasures of the Vatican to help feed the starving people of the world.

Neil Oliver's history of Scotland has been so alluring as to woo me of a Saturday to watch it in real time. The history curriculum I was force-fed at school in the 1950s was, I am slowly realising, and partly thanks to Neil Oliver, an insult to the very word education.  It was the back end of Victorianism - Engand triumphant, rulers of the world (until the USA took over, and for pretty much the same reasons, viz and to wit, exploitation of the world's natural and human resources.)

My early education in history lessons took no account of Scotland (we beat them) or Wales (we beat them) or Ireland (we beat them) or France (we beat them) or Germany (we beat them, twice), and it pretended that this England had never been invaded or conquered.  It was not education: it wasn't even brain-washing. It just denied our innocent young minds access to one uncomfortable truth: that there are at least two sides in every argument, and it tried to persuade us that the best way to learn anything in England was to stick your fingers in your ears, put on the blindfold, and trust your teachers.  And the people who poured this one-sided drivel into us were paid, and handsomely, for the PR job they were doing for the State (or Queen Victoria.)

And it takes you years, and years, and years to undo the damage that your formal education did to you.