Another Year Gone and Closer

That's another year gone by which means that we are a year closer to Christ's return, not as gentle Jesus meek and mild but as all-conquering Lord and King. Calton does not know the time nor the hour however the signs are all stacking up for it to be years rather than decades or centuries. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse (deception, conflict, food inflation and death) are already stalking the earth in a way not seen before (Revelation 5:1-8). More Christians are being killed for their faith (Rev 5:9-11). It is not hard to imagine hostile armies gathering in Israel in the plain of Megiddo (Rev 16:16). Nor is it hard to imagine a one-world government insisting that, in order to buy and sell, you have to have a mark on your hand or forehead (Rev 13:16-17).

Some Christians believe that they are going to be caught up to heaven before things get rough. This is not a view that Calton subscribes to, nice though it would be (for Christians). Life on earth is going to get worse over the next few years and desperate once the Antichrist reveals himself, probably by setting up a statue of himself as God in the newly rebuilt 3rd temple in Jerusalem (Daniel 9:27). Is it significant that King Charles confirmed a covenant with the many people he rules at his coronation and that a statue of him as saviour of the world is already in existence? Calton leaves that for you to decide but, if it is significant, we have less than three years to go before the Antichrist/One World Ruler is revealed. The good news is that three and a half years after the Antichrist takes over, he will be destroyed by the real Saviour of the World - Jesus Christ. 

However the timing pans out, and whoever the Antichrist turns out to be, there is only one name by which we can be saved - Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). Those who put their trust in Him will not be disappointed (Psalm 40:4). Now is the day of salvation (1 Corinthians 6:2) - when Armageddon comes it will be too late.

It Gets Worse

In his last post Calton said he thought that SNP leadership hopeful Kate Forbes was sacrificing her little daughter for the sake of independence. It now transpires that Kate is willing to sacrifice lots of unborn daughters and sons for the sake of independence (or ambition). The fact that they will not be her own children just makes it even worse.

Calton has long thought that Kate had sold out her christian beliefs in order to be part of the SNP Government however he is still shocked to have it confirmed from her own lips. In the past, christians sought political office in order to bring a godly influence to bear on society and to enact godly laws, because they believed that it was for the good of all society. No more it seems. How sad.

A Message for Kate

Calton doesn't believe everything that comes out of Nicola Sturgeon's mouth however there was no doubting the sincerity of her words when she talked about the toll being First Minister has taken on her in her resignation speech. A speech Kate Forbes would do well to listen to again. Sturgeon has devoted her whole life to the cause of independence and her personal life has suffered. Forbes has effectively declared at last night's leadership hustings that the cause of independence is more important to her than being at home to put her little girl to bed. She justifies it by saying that she wants her daughter and other Scottish children to grow up in a free, sovereign and independent country (and she makes the huge assumption that that would be better for them...)

Leaving aside for now the idea that Christians should devote their whole life to God and not Scottish independence, Calton is not alone in being of the view that parents of young children should be devoting themselves to bringing up their offspring. That doesn't preclude mothers and fathers having a career but it does rule out certain jobs - the ones which leave no time for children, like being First Minister of Scotland. That much surely was clear from Nicola Sturgeon's resignation speech.

The early years of a child's life are precious and, once gone, cannot be relived. Quality parental time with the kids does not make up for lack of quantity. There is plenty of time for Kate to be First Minister but her little girl will not be little for long. Kate has been given a great gift and with it comes great responsibility. It saddens Calton to see her sacrifice it to her obsession with independence. Where has Sturgeon's devotion to that cause got her? Nowhere. A life wasted, her dreams unfulfilled and relationships withered and broken.

Calton would rather see children growing up in a country where they are not sexualised from primary school, where harmful transgender ideology is not pushed at them, where the problems of poverty are not exacerbated by the economic costs of independence, where chances to improve their lives are not squandered in the constant search for a grievance against Westminster, where they won't freeze in their homes and schools due to a foolish obsession with Net Zero. Scotland does not need to be independent for real improvement to happen right now. It does need to ditch the incompetent SNP with their one-track minds.

Calton is not a member of any political party and so does not have a vote in the SNP leadership election. He thinks that Kate is by far the best candidate but she would not get his vote if he did have one, for her own sake and for the sake of her little girl.

The SNP's Sick Social Experiment

What is it with Nicola Sturgeon and vulnerable people? First she transferred elderly people out of hospitals and into care homes without testing them for Covid, thereby infecting numerous care home residents with the virus, some fatally. Now it transpires that, under her watch, male offenders have been transferred into women's prisons. Some are still in women's prisons although not the double rapist who has caused the First Minister to admit that transwomen are not women in certain circumstances ...

Just over a week ago Calton was sure that the demise of Sturgeon would be at the hands of angry older women. Now it looks like it has all but been achieved by a man in a blonde wig.

One could give Sturgeon the benefit of the doubt over the care home Covid disaster, however it has now become clear that men in women's prisons was deliberate, planned policy. The Scottish Trans Alliance, one of the Scottish Government's pet charities which is bankrolled by the Scottish taxpayer, deliberately targeted prisons as a means of persuading other public bodies to follow its radical trans agenda. Their reasoning was that, if putting transwomen into women's prisons could be shown to work, the rest of their trans-inclusive policies could be rolled out into society. The SNP government fell for this argument hook, line and sinker, with the result that female offenders became guinea pigs in a sick social experiment which Calton does not doubt was approved by Nicola Sturgeon. (A policy was introduced by the SNP Government under Alex Salmond in 2014 of accommodating transgender prisoners according to their chosen gender. Nicola Sturgeon has continued it.)

The death of elderly residents in care homes was carelessness. The traumatising of vulnerable female prisoners is deliberate and the blame lies with the First Minister of the government which introduced the policy of housing men in women's jails and the First Minister who has continued her predecessor's policy. In Calton's opinion, Nicola Sturgeon should not only resign but be charged with dereliction of duty - the duty to care for the most vulnerable in society.

White Horse Syndrome

Calton has read numerous comments recently which say that Nicola Sturgeon is only using trans people to pick a fight with Westminster. Now, Calton has no doubt that Sturgeon relishes any excuse for a barney, and indeed could probably start a fight in an empty room, but he isn't convinced that she's being quite so cynical over the trans issue. If you read her comments, watch her video plea to trans people leaving the SNP, listen to her on TV, she really does seem to believe in the trans cause. She definitely seems to believe that transwomen are women and are also the most stigmatised minority in Scotland today. In short, she has been captured by trans ideology. There may be personal reasons behind this but there may also be another reason - white horse syndrome.

With her dreams of leading Scotland into independence, Boudicca-style, disappearing into the distance once again, Nicola may be seeing herself, in an appropriate gender role-reversal, as a knight on a white charger, rescuing transwomen in distress and decapitating, or at least silencing, a few Terfs along the way. Never mind that, instead of killing dragons, she's let loose a couple of the monsters called Misogyny and Violence in Scotland. Or that, instead of tilting her lance at Westminster, she's taken aim instead at Scottish women. It's her legacy that's at stake, not independence or the good of the Scottish people.

Fortunately it looks like the anger of older Scottish women may well drag her off her high horse.

A View from the Terf

Calton attended the demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by the Glasgow Cabbie a couple of days ago to protest against Nicola Sturgeon in general and her sordid sex education and the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in particular. It was very well attended, unlike the counter-protest, with a variety of protesters from different backgrounds there. Calton has invited one of them to do a guest post:

"I am a sixty-something Scotswoman. When I was wee, girls became nurses when they grew up and boys became doctors. By the time I left high school I had acceptances from three Scottish universities to study medicine. I decided to study maths and physics instead and was one of a growing number of young women to do so. In the 80s engineering was the last bastion of male-only studies at university. So I became a software engineer upon graduating, working for a large electronics company in Scotland. I had to put up with manspreading, mansplaining and pornographic pictures everywhere I looked. I was never paid as much as men doing the same job, which affects my pension today. It was a really sexist, misogynistic environment but it was nothing compared to the misogyny I see today coming from the Scottish Parliament, under a female First Minister, and I never felt unsafe in the ladies toilets!

In the last three decades of the 20th century women's rights were improving. There was still a gender pay gap and some way to go but we felt we were making progress. We had our first female Prime Minister, pornography gradually disappeared from the workplace and women were no longer told they could only do certain jobs. Now we are going backwards fast under a female First Minister who claims to be a "feminist to her fingertips" but doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word. Young boys are being taught at school that porn is fine - go ahead and have fun with it. Young girls are being admitted to hospital with serious anal injuries after experimenting with a type of sex promoted in school sex education which I hadn't even heard of at their age. A primary school teacher caught two kids trying to have sex in the gender neutral toilets after sex education. This isn't progress and it's damaging kids, girls in particular.

I never used to think of myself as a feminist but I do now - a TERF and proud of it. Nicola Sturgeon doesn't know what a man is but I do and they shouldn't be in women's prisons, women's refuges, women's toilets or any other space reserved for WOMEN. That's why I attended Glasgow Cabbie's demonstration - to say SHAME ON STURGEON and ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

WOMEN WON'T WHEESHT - for the sake of the children."

Nationalism - The Same Everywhere

It is quite something when Scotland's First Minister and the leader of the Scottish National Party condemns the leader of Russia for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine, given that she is constantly agitating for the destruction of the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. Certainly Putin's means should be condemned and Calton has no hestitation in doing so but is an aggressor from outwith the borders necessarily worse than one from within? As long as she continues to eschew violence Sturgeon has the moral superiority over Putin but in other ways they are very similar.

Both of them are harking back to an earlier period in the histories of their countries and wish to return to it. Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and Sturgeon wants Scotland to be independent again. (Independent and bankrupt, just like it was in 1707.) Both of them have an enemy which they are fixated on - NATO and Westminster. They surround themselves with yes-men and don't like criticism. They seem to think they are above the law. And both of them are very reluctant to give up the reins of power.

'Nationalist' seems to be a dirty word with SNP members these days but a nationalist is what Nicola Sturgeon is - by her own admission on many SNP conference video clips. So is Vladimir Putin which just goes to show that nationalism is the same the world over.

How to Start a Bank Run

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is going down a very dangerous path with his threat to freeze the bank accounts of protesters. What he doesn't seem to understand is that the banking system of the western world relies on trust. There are no vaults of gold bars to back our currencies. We deposit our money in the bank because we trust that we will be able to get it back out as and when we need it. When that trust evaporates we get what's known as a run on the bank. In the past that has always happened because trust in the particular bank has failed, as in the run on Northern Rock. Investors in that institution started to get worried that their deposits were not secure and so they queued round the block to get them out. Banks never have enough ready cash to pay out in that situation and so the UK Government had to step in. Otherwise Northern Rock would have gone under, taking people's deposits with it.

Now we have a situation in Canada where a politician is threatening to deny people access to their money. If banks comply with orders to freeze accounts it will have the same effect of damaging trust in the banks, even although the banks are not failing. People, not just in Canada but around the world, will look at what's going on and will start to wonder if they would be better withdrawing at least some of their cash from whichever bank it happens to be deposited with, just in case one day their account is frozen. They may not be planning to protest or do anything else which might merit Trudeau's negative attentions but the seed of doubt has been sown: maybe my money is not as safe as I thought it was. Who knows what the trigger for future invocations of emergency powers might be? They are only supposed to be invoked in extreme situations in Canada but Trudeau is driving a truck through that. More trust destroyed.

In the case of Northern Rock, UK politicians stepped in to save depositors' money (at the expense of shareholders) by nationalising the failing bank. Canada's leader is risking causing a run on healthy Canadian banks by his draconian actions. He may not care if Canadians lose their trust in him but if they lose their trust in the banking system it won't just be him who pays the price.

Shot Down in Flames

 Calton has never seen a newly elected government so beleagured by bad press right from the get-go as the current Scottish Government. Usually there is a honeymoon period but that seems to have been cancelled, just like many other wedding plans and honeymoon trips over the last two years. Sturgeon moved quickly to bolster her position by bringing in the Greens after being denied a majority yet again but it doesn't seem to have helped her popularity, or her temper. Regular watchers of First Minister's Questions will have noticed that, lacking real answers to the opposition questions, she plays the man, not the ball, particularly where Douglas Ross is concerned. The Tory Leader is youthful looking, leading Sturgeon to mock him for being infantile. Such ad hominem attacks are not very smart coming from a woman of a certain age who looks like Maw Broon and sounds like a fishwife but intelligence is not one of the First Minister's strengths. For proof of that one only has to listen to the recording of her speaking on the topic of doors and ventilation at today's FMQs: "If a door is hung in such as way that it is inhibiting the natural flow of air, then one of the options the local authority should have is to rectify that." (She means by chopping bits off the door rather than opening it.) Having been chased up this particular tree by Ross's "absurd" line of questioning, Sturgeon refused to come down, rather like the cat in Trumpton. Unfortunately the real life Fire Brigade has refused to come to her rescue, choosing instead to pour fuel on the flames of the controversy by raising issues of fire safety. If only those pesky firefighters were as compliant as Police Scotland ...

The Smell of Death

The stink of corruption and sleaze coming from the SNP has been rather overpowering recently but underneath it is the sickly smell of something far more worrying - the smell of death. Nicola Sturgeon seems to think that admitting to making a mistake which lead to the deaths of thousands of elderly care home residents will somehow act like febreze, dispelling all smells, but thousands of grieving relatives think otherwise and the promise of an inquiry is small comfort. Early Scottish Government guidance which said that it was advisable for covid cases in care homes not to be sent to hospital and the blanket issuing of Do Not Resuscitate notices or DNRs in care homes show a scant regard for human life, especially elderly, vulnerable human life, on the part of the SNP, and is in keeping with the hope expressed by numerous SNP supporters, including current Edinburgh Central candidate Angus Robertson, that the sooner the older generation die off, the sooner Scotland will be independent.

That desire to see the back of troublesome older people makes it all the more worrying to see that the SNP, in their current manifesto, are planning, if re-elected, to set up a citizen's assembly to look at legalising assisted dying. The Scottish Greens, who might help the SNP to form the next government, are already committed to introducing assisted suicide. At least they are being honest - the SNP are employing their old trick of only committing to some sort of consultation on a contentious topic before an election but their track record shows that their consultations always lead to the outcome they desire (same-sex marriage, the smacking ban being two examples of this).

At the other end of life, Nicola Sturgeon announced in September 2020 that expanded abortion access was a priority for the Scottish Government and the SNP currently does not seem to support the right of politicians of Northern Ireland to decide on abortion laws for the province, preferring to sit on their hands while Westminster imposes extremely liberal abortion laws on a devolved government against its wishes. This is total hypocrisy on the part of the SNP who would scream blue murder if Westminster tried the same tactic with Holyrood.

The Scottish Government has recently tried to say that saving lives has been their priority during the Covid pandemic. Calton thinks that they have actually become accustomed to a culture of death, whether it be in care homes due to covid, a back alley due to drugs or in the womb due to abortion because actions (or inaction) speak louder than words and the statistics speak for themselves.