Saturday 30 October 2010

Words Fail Me - "The Gun Thumball"

I really am lost for words.

Whatever happened to letting kids play with toy guns as a way of them understanding the actions and consequences of using guns? After all, when you've pretend killed killed your best mate for the umpteenth time, it sort of gets boring and you move onto something else.

This thumball just seems to me to be counter-productive. It glorifies the names of guns, without there being an outlet to satisfy the curiosity of those involved. I suspect this is an American invention, which is fine over there as if you want to see what a MAC-10 looks like, even to test one out and see its potential for causing death, once you are old enough you can readily go into a gun store. Over here, it remains as an alluring, unobtainable name, as taboo and cool as illegal drugs, imprinted on the young at an impressionable age.

Anything that is designed from the outset to challenge kids to discuss guns "in a safe and fun way"  is to me totally misguided. Guns are neither safe nor fun.

Thursday 28 October 2010

Yet Another Eco-Bandwagon

Within a week of the climategate scandal and the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, the Eco-loon plan-B was brought into play: "Bio-Diversity".

"Man-Made Global Warming", that had been proven to be a fallacy, had become "Climate Change" and when that had convincingly been shot to pieces as a theory, the eco-nutters jumped on the bio-diversity bandwagon and steered it down the same rocky road as all the other bandwagons.

So we see in Japan the UN bio-diversity conference spouting out the same old shit about man being responsible for the extinction of thousands of species, despite billions and trillions of species having lived and died out long before man progressed to the industrial revolution.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Man Is Not God; we can't preserve the world in aspic: whether its keeping gasses in the air constant, or keeping all the current species alive. The planet contains trillions of living, breathing life-forms. Some are successful, some are not. Some survive on the planet for billions of years, others die out in a geological nanosecond.

It is beyond our power as humans to even attempt to do any of the things the U.N, the climatologists, bio-diversity nutters and assorted eco-loons would like to have us do. Its cloud cuckoo land, a fantasy world. In reality its a mechanism to scare us into thinking we're killing cute things in order to create legislation to control ever-more aspects of our lives, for no end whatsoever. I've yet to see mention of one single study that has shown the direct benefits to the Amazonian rainforest of the E.U.'s directives on how much of a new car has to be recyclable.

Of course the fact is that it'd be better in every single way if that car hadn't consumed vast amounts of energy and raw materials in its production and its owner had simply carried on using their old car. But we live in a consumerist society, run by huge corporations who cause vast amounts of damage to the environment. However, we must continue to consume in order for them to make a profit and for their huge corporate financial shareholders to keep getting paid a dividend. They need us to foot the bill in higher taxes and more punative levies , demonising us the consumer rather than the corporation, for if they were to pay the price and profits were reduced, their corporate shareholders would squeak most loudly to our governments that this was most unfair and that they may not be able to find the funds to support election campaigns. Mock charities are set up and funded both by corporations and governments in order to reinforce so-called "independant" views that we the consumer are evil and should mend our wicked ways. New forms of profit making are created, making trillions of dollars literally our of thin air in the form of carbon trading: making firms pay compensation for producing goods, with the costs passed onto us, the consumer. Carbon trading or "offsetting" is supposed to offset the production of CO2, but in reality only offsets the loss of profits the huge corporations suffer as we consume less of their trinkets.

And so us, the little guy at the bottom of the pile, gets punished for the sins of the rich elite. We endure higher taxes, higher energy costs, all because we are told it will save some fluffy thing (it always has to be a fluffy thing as no-one would mourn the extinction of killer bees, for example) in a forest so far away we are unable to verify the fact ourselves. Instead we gullibly rely on the fake charities set up by the elite to tell us how endangered the fluffy things are and preach to us how we should mend our ways.

Let the poor benighted fluffy thing pass on with dignity, let something else in the local ecology take up its niche instead. Thats how evolution works and will continue to work long after humanity, the not-quite-so-fluffy animal has also encountered its extinction.

Sunday 24 October 2010

The Sick Joke That is MultiCulturalism

Angela Merkel announced the other week that multiculturalism has failed. I and many others have known this for a number of decades, but only now are politicians seeing the folly of the foolhardy project that is multiculturalism.

Now before I get tarred as a racist, I don't have a problem with immigration. I lived in a multicultural area back in the sixties. I had friends of all creeds and races.

I grew up surrounded by Eastern European immigrant families who stayed here after World War Two. They integrated into society and when they wanted a cultural centre, they all chipped in together and set up their own community centre: no government money was asked or extorted.

I saw the first wave of asian immigrants arrive, who also integrated, being successful acedemically and becoming doctors and lawyers.

The second wave came and I saw the rise of the cliched asian corner shop: it was truly open all hours and thrived because of the ingenuity of its owners in exploiting their religion to provide a more convenient service for its local community.

I saw the influx of Chinese and Vietnamese and the conversion of the local chippy from one selling pies and chips to one selling something more exotic (and what became a vice of mine at an early age: plain beansprouts in soy sauce).

But then came the idea of "multiculturalism": a culture where people never integrated, where they never attempted to learn English, where they cajoled the state into providing community centres and language translation, which brought with it forced arranged marriages, honour killings, ghettos, human trafficking, gangs, racism, imposition of sharia law over UK law, radicalism, bhurkas, positive discrimination and all the other negative aspects of immigration.

Multiculturalism to me is a sick joke, mainly because I know how good things can be if it was left to happen organically and government doesn't stick its oar in. It has truly failed, and to help immigrants drag themselves from  the ghettos, to promote education, to really make a difference and benefit their adopted country and also their own communities, we need to start thinking in terms of integration. To aspire to become the best that UK culture allows, not to allow the baggage of their previous generations to hold them back.

Update:

The more I think about it, the more I research, the more I find that "multiculturalism" is counter-productive. I mean, why would you deliberately set out to emphasise the differences between cultures, it can only cause trouble? Why would you impoverish certain ethnic groups enough so that they fight each other, as in the gang culture? Why would you promote such isolationist policies that people would live in the UK for decades, yet still wouldn't be able to communicate directly with various agencies: who has the vested interest in being the go-between? Why would you allow a mysogenistic legal framework to stand in the UK after decades of fighting for women's rights?

The more I look at the the whole mess, I can only think its a deliberate ploy to keep minorities subsumed, an isolated minority group under the control of a handful of people that attain power by posing as go-betweens. The gang culture is allowed to happen in order for black youth to concentrate on killing each other, rather than attaining a decent level of education and integration.

I can only wonder if this strategy of non-integration is promoted so that one day sometime in the future, someone from the political elite can use minorities as scapegoats. The more they are different, the more they stand out. The more isolated they are, the easier is is for the larger population to dehumanise them.

The more integrated they are in society, the harder it is to single minorities out. Just think about that.