More young people aged between 18-34 voted in Big Brother than in the last General Election.
An appalling indictment on the state of British politics and politicians? Make it more relevant to 'yoof' suggests the Guardian by introducing online voting and Presidential style debates. But whatever you do, 'curb your inclination to condemn the new generation of voters as lazy'.
Well my inclinations are not so easily curbed. Criticising 'young people' is one of the last taboos but the only conclusion one can draw from this fact is how badly it reflects on Generation Y (roughly those born between 1976 and 2000).
There is an old Chinese saying of 'rice paddy to rice paddy in three generations' i.e the first generation of poor workers (Baby Boomers) takes risk and with little to lose succeeds in creating wealth. The second generation (Generation X), brought up by parents who experienced poverty are constantly reminded of the need to work hard and save, succeed only in maintaining the family fortune but not in expanding it (as this would require risk). Then, the third generation (Generation Y), raised indulgently by helicopter parents who never knew hardship, reject the work ethic, place their hedonistic lifestyles first and fritter it all away.
Are we at the third stage of a natural cycle of prosperity that began after World War II? I think we are but thanks to globalisation and immigration, help is at hand.
In science, there is a deadly process known innocently as a 'positive feedback loop'. The vast majority of interactions in nature are 'negative feedback loops'. For example, your brain sends signals to your hypothalamus when the body is low on carbohydrate and you eat. During the eating process, your hypothalamus relays signals back to the brain, indicating that enough calories have been ingested, you feel full and you stop eating. A positive feedback loop feeds on itself to increase the action as opposed to reducing it, for example in a nuclear reactor.
One of the consequences of the State's malign involvement in education has been the failure of its schools to educate children. As a result, children are leaving school knowing less about the world. Politicians then appear who can appeal to this dumbed-down audience and play on their ignorant concerns. Television also dumbs itself down to ensure viewers and news programs become news-lite, celeb-focused or get shifted to unsocial hours. This in turn produces an even more ignorant generation. This positive feedback loop can reduce educational standards in our schools incredibly quickly.
What can be done to reverse this dumbing trend?
i) Get the State out of the business of managing education. Its role should be one of funding only.
ii) Open immigration. Whilst our Anglo kids are exploring their inner selves by shovelling elephant shit in Kenya, hordes of Indian, Eastern European and Chinese kids, whose parents knew only hardship, are taking their place on the prosperity pecking order.
Once the Trust Fund runs dry, the cycle will begin again. But for now, it sure is painful to watch this indulgent, pampered, Prozac-dependent generation.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Generation Y
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Fat Friends
Overweight? Can't slim down? Looking for someone else to blame? Then help is at hand.
A new study by the Harvard Medical School, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that obesity is "socially contagious", demonstrating that if your friend becomes obese your chances of becoming obese go up by 57%.
So in addition to blaming your glands, or your large bones, you can now blame your mates too!
An alternative and radical theory for obesity was put forward by Dr. Bleedinobvious, who stated that 'people who are overweight eat too much and take too little exercise'. But blaming someone else is so much easier.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Why I'll Never Be A Hard-Core Libertarian
A proposal by England's chief medical officer,Sir Liam Donaldson, to introduce a system of 'presumed consent' to tackle organ shortages and endorsed by the British Medical Association, has been met with outrage by the liberal blogosphere.
Conservative shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, rightly said
"The state does not own our bodies or have a right to take organs after death."
And a system of presumed consent has already been rejected by MPs when they voted on the Human Tissues Act in 2004.
But here's the problem;
Due to advances in medical technology, young people are not dying young anymore. Hence the pool of suitable organs is shrinking. Only 46% of families consent to organ donation resulting in about 360 deaths per year from failures to find a suitable donor. And efforts to persuade more people to either carry donor cards or sign up to the NHS Organ Donor Register has failed, according to Sir Liam. Only 20% of the population are on the register, despite the fact that surveys showed that as many as 70% of people wanted to donate their organs after death.
i.e. apathy is the problem not principle.
Two European countries offer evidence of what will happen if donor consent is presumed.
i) Spain; donation rates have almost doubled since a system of presumed consent was introduced in 1990. Spain runs a so-called "soft" opt-out system, where even if the person has not themselves opted out of donation while alive, the views of relatives are sought and they can refuse consent.
ii) Austria runs a very strict system where the views of relatives are not taken into account at all. After Vienna passed the presumed consent law in 1982, the donation rate quadrupled and by 1990 the number of kidney transplants performed was nearly equal to those on the waiting list.
To the outraged libertarians;
i) people can opt out if they do not wish their organs to be used. No-one is being forced to donate organs.
ii) even if the person forgets to opt out, the views of their families are still sought.
iii) 360 lives may be saved by this simple piece of legislation.
I fail to be outraged.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The Saltie Is Back!
The northeast coast of Australia is facing an explosion in its population of saltwater crocodiles, which are protected by law but are becoming a menace to swimmers, surfers and the inhabitants of some towns’ outer suburbs.
An endangered species in the 1960s, by 1974 the Saltwater Crocodile was finally protected by authorities. Today, a combination of a successful hunting ban and a decline in the number of dingoes (which eat their eggs), has seen their numbers return to levels not seen since the the time of the settlers in 1788.
However, the problem is now so serious that there are calls for the country’s strict gun laws to be relaxed and hunters to be given open season on crocodiles.
Bob Katter, an independent MP, said that crocodile numbers had reached“plague proportions” and the huge reptiles were moving into places where they had never been seen before.
Locals have reported man-eating crocodiles basking near popular swimming spots and boat ramps. In Cairns and Townsville they have even been seen sunning themselves on surf beaches.
"There are some 50,000 people living on river banks and shoreline between Townsville and Cairns. If you’re going into these areas you really need to take some sort of firearm to protect yourselves,” Katter said.
Crocodiles have killed about a dozen people in Queensland in the past 10 years, half of them tourists from other countries.
via Australian Politics
Kids, don't try this at home,
London - MultiCulti Paradise or a Ghetto?
Celebrating diversity in London?
Interestingly an ethnic map of Sydney and Paris would look the exact opposite.
via A Tangled Web.
Monday, July 23, 2007
An Open Letter
This is an open letter to all those would approve of this action.
Dear Sir or Madam
I despise you.
I despise your petty, vindictive rules and your tedious way of life.
I despise you for dreaming up and enforcing rules such as these. Rules that make people shake with anger and seek solace in the arms of truly unsavoury folk.
I despise you for making this man feel guilty about taking pride in his own country.
I despise you for presuming to tell me what I can and cannot do. How dare you tell me that I cannot smoke or drink myself to an early grave. Should i wish to dine at McDonalds or mainline Class A drugs of an evening, that is my look out not yours. I care little for you, why do you care for me? Is it my health that concerns you or is it really the power to order me around?
I despise you for the destruction you have caused to Australia's Aboriginal communities with your cradle-to-grave welfare and your paternalist condescension. But i despise you more for not having the guts to admit your appalling mistakes. And yet now you seek to impose this morally bankrupt creed on the rest of us.
I despise you for infantilising grown men, in particular the working class, the entire continent of Africa and our migrant communities. Kipling could not have been more proud of your adoption of his 'White Man's Burden' mantra. Try for once treating adults as adults and you might be surprised at the results.
I despise organisations such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and the WWF, unelected institutions that seek to impose their nannying, dogmatic beliefs wherever they go, that do little more than provide gap-year jobs for the sons and daughters of middle class bankers and lawyers.
I despise you for trashing the good names of words such as 'diversity', 'tolerance', 'respect', 'progress', 'charity' and 'community'. Words and concepts that have made this country such a magnet for others have now become little more than Orwellian IngSoc. '1984' was written as a warning not a fucking instruction manual.
I despise you for your dishonest corruption of the environment - the single greatest gift to mankind. You have lied about its imminent demise, you have arrogantly presumed mankind is is to blame and that nature revolves around man, you have sown the seeds of guilt and doubt and made people turn and inform on one another. All in the name of a science that is as unproven as your fascism.
I despise you for presuming to know best how I should raise my children. Well, I treat my children to junk food, I let them watch TV and I discipline them for stepping out of line.
I despise your attempts to censor my right to speak, all in the name of not giving offence. Well, you offend me deeply, you mealy-mouthed jumped up middle class prick.
I despise you for your attempts to destroy families and communities all in the name of 'progress' and 'change'. In business, they teach you not to try to fix what isn't broken, but you wouldn't know this, as the closest you have come to creating wealth is sucking the interest out of Daddy's Trust Fund.
I despise you for your double standards and hypocrisy; you viciously attack and ridicule some Gods and Prophets whilst choosing to ignore the nihilistic actions of others.
I despise you for sowing doubt in the fields of right and wrong. 'Thou shalt not kill' or ''do no harm to your neighbour' are universal morals, not cultural artefacts of a bygone era.
But most of all i despise you for carrying out these destructive, nihilistic actions in the name of progress, of the poor, of charity, of selflessness, of helping one's neighbour, of doing one's bit. No such moral reasons are in your thoughts. It is power that drives you, intereference that delights you and bossiness that appeals to you.
C.S.Lewis once remarked that 'of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies'. How prophetic these words seem today.
So let me tell you, you Fairtrade-coffee drinking, tofu-munching goody-two-shoes, the single biggest problem facing the planet is not Global Poverty or Environmental Annihilation, nor is it No Child Left Behind, but your arrogance to presume to interfere and poke your beak into every aspect of my life, and the viciously smug puritanism of your totalitarian creed.
Now just fuck off and leave me alone.
Pommy
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Posh Spice in Hollywood
I watched crash-TV the other night; the excrutiating Posh Spice 'Coming To America' show.
Stolen from the inestimable Theospark (don't click his site if you are at work or are offended by pictures of scantily clad women).
Friday, July 20, 2007
Friedman Friday
In honour of the great man, once a week i will scour the blogosphere for stories that might bring a wry smile.
i) Markets are like weeds. Despite the best efforts of government bureaucracies to nail them down, they will spring up where you least expect them. Hit & Run reports that due to punitive and unfair driving laws, a market has opened up for French licence points .
ii) Chris Dillow thinks that us liberty-lovers are complete pussies at marketing our cause. He has five suggestions for us to become more evangelical.
iii) The man who is neither a Bishop nor a Hill makes a promising start at a UK Bill of Rights.
iv) New blogger, Mark Wadsworth, discovers that British single mums are paying a 70% tax rate.
v) We all know that 'it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner', but the argument against corporate social responsibility (CSR) is so much more powerful when sung... I give you the Milton Friedman choir.
'The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits'
Milton Friedman
vi) Question; What is the only telecoms market in the world without any government regulation? Answer; Somalia. And guess what - it's thriving. Funny that. The BBC are astonished,
'but how do you establish a phone company in a country where there is no government? In some respects, it is actually easier. There is no need to get a licence and there is no state-run monopoly which prevents new competitors being established. And of course there is no-one to demand any taxes, which is one reason why prices are so low.'
mmm.... penny dropping?
Tomorrow Is Harry Potter Day
And who says our society has become emasculated and feeble?
"I wouldn't want my kids to read it, and after all these years they die. They become so involved it becomes a little hard to take. I wouldn't want my 12-year-old to feel cheated, almost. I know they have to learn about a certain part of life but today's children grow up too fast. They should be entitled to enjoy it and dream about it when they are finished reading it."
Esther Segelman, a Miami Beach mother of eight.
'J K Rowling has said two major characters will die in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Speculation is rife that hallowed Harry Potter himself may meet his maker.
This could be devastating for some impressionable children who have grown up with the bespectacled boy wizard for the past 10 years.'
Oh, purleeeeasee.
My boy can barely contain himself and he can't even read yet.
The World's Top Blogger
100 million page views in 600 days....
Chinese actress-turned-director, Xu Jinglei, is the world's most widely read blogger.
Xu won international acclaim when she won the best director award for Letter From An Unknown Woman at the 2004 San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain.
100 million...working on it.
