Differently-abled Bears

April 26th, 2008 – A Canadian gouvernmental panel has declared that the 15,000 remaining polar bears are ''at risk'' in the great north due to hunting and global warming. Furthermore, this panel concluded that, unfortunately, the polar population was not declining fast enough to be declared an endangered species. Instead, they have assigned to it the PC/alarmist for the fun of it, term ''species of special concern'', or what I call ''bearcapable''.

Once again the eco-friendly lobby groups, and the political parties liable to gain by catering to them, are stirring up a storm of controversy where there is none. They even admit there is no immediate danger yet this story is on every major western media service this morning. Other lesser concerns include: a pending civil war in Zimbabwe, dozens dying in renewed Gaza fighting, Syria trying to build a nuclear reactor, the failure of teen abstinence programs in the US and a man being killed by a shark in California. The green lobby thinks too much and doesn’t necessarily need to invent concern where there is none; they could simply trivialize important news towards their cause. Example: The South African marmot population declining rapidly amid Zimbabwe tensions, Murdered Palestinians polluting arable soils by not being recycled, Syria making great strides in eliminating dangerous fossil fuels and going ''green'' with nuclear power (you see the play on words there?), Teen abstinence program fails while vegan propaganda soars and finally, Pacific shark population endangered by fatty diet. It’s not perfect but then again, I don’t have the hundreds of millions of dollars in discretionary funds to twist these stories in a properly questionable manner.

On the other hand, the Polar bear population WILL adapt to receding ice sheets and the Canadian government can certainly impose a limit on a number of polar pelts we are allowed to gather. To be fair to humans, polar bears have no natural predators, kill many baby seals and wear fur, what a hypocritical bear. They also seem to be using advanced technology such as winter camouflage and thermal invisibility, what devious and shameless creatures! You see, anthropomorphisation (the assignation of human emotion, values and motivations to animals) has to go both ways if PETA shows us pictures of ''depressed'' test rabbits and ''happy'' released lab rats.

To tie in the concepts of obeying to the whims of the green lobby and their misdirection/manipulation of the public, we are taking a trip to 1739…39…9…9…(echo). Benjamin Franklin and the other founding father could disputably have a bone to pick with the massive urbanization of the American east coast, considering that tanneries and butcheries operate directly in city centers, dumping their toxic waste into the streets. Later in the XIXth century, Franklin’s petition of ''natural rights'' inspired other green movements, mostly championed by artists… One such writer was Henry David Thoreau. During his illustrious career, he retreated from society into the deep wild and wrote about Nature’s inherent and primary rights. In his book ''Walden'', he even cited that people should become intimately close with nature (I kid you not). Not to compare Thoreau with Al Gore but at least the former seemed to personally apply his preaching whereas the latter drives around in a diesel limo fueled by self-satisfaction. Thoreau greatly influenced the masses and therefore the government by propagating his views of subservience of human rights to nature (screw the slaves, they are keeping the cotton and tobacco fields happy).

Back to 2008…08….8…8…(echo), don’t get me wrong, I respect people who stand up for a cause they believe in. I just question the priorities of such people and lose all respect for them when they try to manipulate public opinion through alarmist propaganda. The special needs bears will probably not know they are now a species of special concern or that I am laughing at them (hopefully). They are only concerned with the juicy fish that doesn’t know what’s coming and the native hunters running after it. The Canadian government needs to either put more money in tax reforms or put more money in Bear legislation. One thing they absolutely have to do is stop creating committees that pump out fatuous and useless reports with no concrete results, simply to capitalize on the green fad.

(I promise I will lay off Al Gore for a few months)

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(Pictured: Henry David Thoreau, trying to spot a foxy tree hole - Two Polar bears evolving bipedal movement to one day replace us all)

End.

Feed the world, make it a greener place

April 13th 2008 – The Haitian president has been ousted and riots are breaking out worldwide over a food “shortage”. This follows an explosion in food prices in every country, a special downer if you live in a country where supper is a luxury; you may even notice that the bread at your local bakery has gone through a price mark-up of over 200% in the past year. The culprit, in two words, can be summed up as Al Gore.

Granted, I have to nuance my accusation and clarify that former vice-president, Nobel peace prize winner and all-around swell guy Al Gore is not personally going around the world to raise prices like an evil version of that damned Wal-mart smiley face...but I digress. The main reason that the food prices are increasing astronomically is simple supply and demand. We are producing less and less food and for some reason, demand is not going down. Why are we producing less food? It’s simple, the basic grains produced worldwide are no longer exclusively going towards the production of food and delicious Whiskey, it is also going towards the processing of ethanol. This wonder-juice is used in hybrid and eco-friendly cars in the western world and in the misguided third-world countries that want to please Europe and America by reducing pollution rather than feeding their “electors” (*see the current situation in Zimbabwe). Famine was soooo eighties, sorry Somalia, 2008 is a bad year to be hungry, Bob Geldof would have cared a lot more if it were thirty years ago.

I am now speaking to my several fans on the African continent (all 7 of them). Here is something, perhaps obvious, that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United-States, the European Union, etc. will not overtly tell you. Trees, whales, baby seals, Algae, Kiwi birds, leg hair, Halliburton, Britney Spears, Survivor and Pandas are all more important than you. With the hundreds of million, even billions of American dollars pumped into non-governmental organisations by the aforementioned economic world powers, we could easily feed you but if we do, the panda (an animal that, for all intents and purposes should be extinct, check out their mating practises...seriously) will die out forever. Perhaps I am being overly dramatic yet I don’t think I am guiltier than hippies chained to a tree while collecting welfare cheques.

I could trivially pick a historical example where food was a secondary priority to environmentalism except that THIS IS THE FIRST TIME EVER. Just as AIDS, hair metal, new wave music and communism, the western world seems to treat famine like a fad of the eighties. I agree we have to replace our oil consumption with a new source of energy, if only to prepare for the inevitable shortage of the material. Except that, on a quick list I drew up, converting food to fuel is nowhere near the top of the list (human waste is – think about it, you park on the side of the highway and go at it in your gas tank’s intake...). I could say we have to prioritise yet most of us don't have the time to go out and care, mush less do something about it.

Rick Astley is making a comeback, maybe famine is next.

(Pictured - the last time the world cared about famine and Bob Geldof - Al Gore, coming for you.)

End.

(Post scriptum: This is only to say that my final exams are soon here and thus the interval between each post is growing but it warms my heart to accuse Al Gore of encouraging thousands of deaths every day. Give the man another award!)

Politicians? Flawed? It simply can't be!

Tuesday April 1st 2008 – Finland’s foreign minister, Ilkka Kanerva, has quit after a slew of his text messages were printed in Helsinki. These messages vividly indicated the minister’s fetish for strippers and specifically his affinity for their underwear. That same day, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern resigned after 11 years in power amid confessions that he received bribes from major companies during the 1990s’ Irish economic boom. A few weeks ago, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was also exposed by the publication of text messages that showed he was having an affair with a stripper. Unfortunately or ironically, your choice, he testified to the contrary during a police scandal inquiry and thus today he faces 15 years of jail time for perjury and impeding a federal investigation. Finally, last March, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after it was discovered that he was repeatedly availing himself of the services of a very high-class prostitute (Keeping in mind he was elected on a strict platform of anti-prostitution legislation and crackdowns).

I could easily bash these two-timing hypocrites for their lies, infidelities and perversion of a judicial system they pretend to uphold, yet I will leave them alone because they either got or are going to get what is coming to them. I WILL focus on my favorite target, Al Gore….I mean, mass worldwide media.

Concerning the Spitzer case, the story went around the world in a flash and various impartial commentators from Fox News to Al Jazeera had their self-righteous two-cents to put in. They claim that politicians must be ethically irreproachable, morally flawless and socially minded (Al Jazeera was actually babbling something about Satan or Bush or Virgins…my Arabic is rusty). Once again, the media does not BELIEVE what they are saying; they aim only to scare and to expose these trivial cases in a sea of mediocre and unimportant news that is the beginning of 2008. Don’t kid yourself, the only people that can actually achieve any position of power in the Western world MUST, by definition, be ethically questionable, morally flawed and self-centered. They DO care about the citizens they represent yet this is only to fuel their own massive ego. To back up my claim that the media don’t actually believe what they are printing, I simply refer you to the veritable pornucopia of sexual misconduct and questionable practices that Western World leaders have engaged in over the last century, some of them easily brushing them off to even be reelected.

It would be much too tempting to digress into the atrocities of the fascist of communist dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Ceausescu, Pinochet, Stalin, Hoenecker… so I won’t. Instead, let me illustrate some virtuous men that were the elected representatives of supposedly virtuous nations. For the USA, Slick Willy Clinton and his magical cigar (with a side of perjury…and no, it does NOT depend on what my definition of IS is) still fostered the biggest economic boom since the sixties and today, we find the whole Lewinsky thing funny. Richard Nixon finally pulled out of Vietnam after a catastrophic campaign and went on to break several laws at the Watergate Hotel. He is now remembered as a famous Halloween mask. For Great-Britain, one of Prime Minister Lloyd George’s ministers in 1922 was Sir Oswald Mosley, a man who went on to form a British fascist movement whilst vacationing with Hitler in Munich (I couldn’t help myself). In Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien physically assaulted a photographer in front of dozens of witnesses in the late 90s, he was reelected three times!

Canada can help tie up my point. Since the conservatives took power in 2006, they actually have kept their electoral promises. This has been published in every Canadian medium as irregular and shifty since people are definitely not used to this. To this day, Canadian media have been trying to literally find corpses in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s closet or porn titles on his film rental records or a subscription to fisting monthly... We KNOW our politicians are cunning, clever and two-faced. We get confused when they hide it too well and even disappointed if they are honest. Come on Mr. Harper throw us a bone here, anonymously send us your text messages so that we don’t die of news deprivation.

The media are disgusting, we are disgusting for reading them and our politicians must be equally disgusting if they are to truly represent us.

(Pictured: Richard Nixon, not being a crook - Ex-governor Eliot Spitzer looking like he really regrets it and his wife in the background who is going to make him REALLY regret it.)

End.

Discord in the nether-regions

(Muhammed not being pictured)


March 22nd, 2008 – A right-wing politician of the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, is about to release a film entitled Fitna; an Arabic word meaning religious discord or strife. This 15 minute feature describes the Islamic peoples as the ‘enemies of freedom’ whose utmost goal is the eradication of our liberties. Needless to say, the impending screening of the movie has sparked massive protest in Amsterdam as well as the official condemnation of Iran and Pakistan.

I am not going to analyze the Middle-Eastern anger at this new piece of anti-Muslim propaganda for two very valid reasons. Firstly, it would be quite boring since it can be summed up as: we are being criticized and denigrated therefore we are not happy. Secondly, I will avoid this aspect since, in the past year, I have somehow attracted a wide readership in the Muslim world (Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates…) and someone is bound to figure out where I live. This actually brings me to the point I wanted to discuss.

I question the motivation of the protesters whom took to the streets this Saturday as well as the dissociation from Geert of the Nether-gouvernment (awesomest adjectival form I could invent). It would be quite simple to say that the citizens of Amsterdam have a heightened sense of world community and a very low threshold for prejudice and racial opinion. I have faith in mankind yet unlike the Christian ones, my faith is grounded in harsh reality (I am going to close the blinds now). I truly believe that these protesters had better things to do and are thus protesting for a reason much closer to their personal interests. Two years ago, a Danish newspaper printed derogatory illustrations of the prophet Muhammed (Praise be unto him). This provoked a violent reaction from the Middle-East to the point where diplomats from Scandinavian countries were threatened and pulled out, the author and publisher of the journal had a price put on their heads and several terrorist attempts were made on the Danish people. I propose that this Nether-protest is a reactionary movement to show the Middle-East how this film was made by a marginal man with no supporters (subtext reading: please don’t hurt us…I like your head scarf…does it come in different colours?). My hypothesis is certainly corroborated by the Nether-President’s dissociation from the film and Mr. Wilders.

I consider myself a conservative libertarian. That means I will actively fight restrictions imposed on personal liberties yet I suggest that thorough discussions should precede any widespread exercise of these liberties. Geert does not incite rioting and hate crimes with his film; he is rather exposing his suggestion that the Muslim faith does not respect our democratic and liberal ideals in their own countries and thus dubs them ‘enemies of freedom’. I agree that taking a basic fact and extrapolating a generalizing truth to incite a certain behaviour is almost the dictionary definition of propaganda. I still believe Geert has the right to produce his film without the threat of bodily harm. Furthermore, critics, historians, sociologists, ethnologists and Ann Coulter will also be able to use the same raw data Geert used, add more and interpret it the way they want. Life and knowledge should be about debate. We will never find a universal truth about anything but it is not futile since we have fun pretending like we know stuff.

Douglas Adams famously enounced that we don’t know a billionth of percent about anything. I say thank Xenu since we have stuff to talk about and discuss freely. The Nether-protesters who try to boycott and censure a movie in the name of liberalism and democracy are guilty of much more hubris than Geert in my opinion.

(For those of you keeping count, I used Geert’s name 6 times in this blog, what a great name.)



(Pictured: The prophet muhammed (praise be unto him) not being pictured - Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejad saying that he's OK with my blog.)



End.

I am going to Heaven because I believe St. Peter will take my Bribe

March 10th, 2008 – Pope Benedict XVI’s 2^nd in command (therefore God’s third in Command) Archbishop Gianfranco Giotti has thought long and hard to give us 7 new deadly sins. I know you are all disappointed because you had a special place in your heart for the original 7. They were a perfect cocktail for a guaranteed memorable outing on the town (Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Pride, Anger) or alone at home (Sloth). They also had awesome consequences at the hands of Kevin Spacey. Don’t worry too much, just in case you found a loophole in the last seven that could actually get you in heaven, the new 7 “social sins” as they are called, are cumulative to the classics and retroactive (I’m guessing).

You may question why the Roman Catholic Church would take the time to draft these up today instead of 500 years ago or 200 years from now but that would make you a heathen. Now go say 25 Hail Mary’s with your eyes closed on the priest’s lap. If you want a serious albeit cynical answer, my hypothesis is that the Vatican is very slowly acknowledging the fact that they are a corporation and have thus appropriated themselves with the indispensible Marketing Department. The marketers have assessed the current market image of the Church and have been telling their CEO (God) that a miracle could turn things around. When nothing happened and they remembered the mysterious ways thing (God’s Hawaii vacation loophole), they searched world media for trendy and easy changes they could implement.

The first trend they found was “Hollywood”. They saw how much money and media coverage surrounded such movies as Seven, The Passion of the Christ or the Da vinci Code and are simply going to rework some basic fundaments of their religion accordingly to modernise them...without actually changing them (Keep an eye out for the new ten commandments sometime in the future).

Keeping in our trendy vein, the new sins involve, directly or indirectly, drug abuse, abortion, stem cell research, global warming and globalisation. Clearly the archbishop ran out of sins to include Britney Spears, vegetarianism, Feng Shui, PETA, haki sacks and emo kids. Far be it for me to call the Vatican opportunist hippies...

For your intense pleasure and immediate relegation to the deepest abyss of popular memory (where the new 7 wonders of the world are now), here are the new deadly or “social sins”. They were kept vague by intentionally bulletpointing and not phrasing them.

1) Environmental pollution

2) Genetic manipulation

3) Accumulating excessive wealth

4) Inflicting poverty

5) Drug trafficking and consumption

6) Morally debatable experiments

7) Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

As you can see, the Marketing department got Al Gore to write these up. My only immediate problem with this new declaration of very little relevance and importance is two-fold. Firstly, as with the first 7 sins, I can quote from memory, Popes that have been guilty of all of these. Secondly, The Vatican’s PR department must know this and thus take us for illiterate morons once again.

I accuse Pope John Paul II of massive campaigning against birth control in Sub-Saharan Africa thus contributing to overpopulation, the single most influential factor inflicting poverty in the area (4). I accuse Pope Leon XII of abusing Cocaine and extolling the virtues of its daily consumption to the world (5). I accuse Pope Pius XI of complying with the Nazi removal of all Jews from Rome (7). I accuse all popes in the last millennium of accumulating excessive wealth in the midst of constant and renewed poverty and suffering (3). Finally, I accuse Pope Benedict XVI of not have an Electric Popemobile (1). I am pretty sure certain popes personally experimented with human-sheep hybrids to literalise the Bible (2,6) yet I can only back this up with very little sources (and by very little I mean none at all, that’s good enough for Catholic people, right?).

Hell is going to be really crowded...

(Pictured: Bosch's Renaissance depiction of the original sins - God's henchmen are conspicuously always white)

End.