I’m a Pundit

Suicide Bombing was a far and distant terror for most people until the 9/11 attacks. Recently though it seems to have dropped from the news, but in reality there are still a huge amount of suicide bombings occurring in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The difference is they are now targeting civilians in their own countries. I really despair as to what they hope to achieve by bombing, for instance, a market filled with women and children, barely any men and no security forces.

How can someones mind be twisted to a point where they not only believe this is a good idea, but that the senseless slaughter of the children of their own country will somehow guarantee them a place in heaven.

It seems however that this will not stop occurring in the near future, and there is not really any possible way we can prevent it ourselves, after all how do you reason with a person so undeniably insane that they will blow themselves up around children and women with the sole goal of hatred and revenge and the belief that they will go to heaven afterwards.

It saddened me to think that in today’s day and age there are people out there who can seriously bomb the weak and think they are doing the correct thing

written by Oli \\ tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, Suicide Bombing, War

I have just read a story on Fox News about how the Canadian Government will be giving out free heroin to addicts.  Now from a generic viewpoint this has been put in place to reduce HIV, overdoses, death and crime. 

Ok I can see where they are coming from, give them free clean heroin and you remove the problems.

I have another idea, for every convicted felon for burglary we should give a government stipend of $5000, this way they wont need to rob people and they wont injure themselves when they are ‘working’ 

Maybe they should set up an online application for people who were thinking of becoming criminals ‘sign up now and we will send you money not to commit crimes!’

You could have options to change your stipend, 

‘Will you or do you

a) Rob houses for upto $10,000 dollars per month 

b) Rob or steal Items of upto $5,000 dollars value per month

c) Mug homies of other gangs yo innit for a poppin $1000 a mo in that right mutha f*ker’ 

Do you kinda see what I’m getting at here?

Of course the guy leading this campaign seems absolutely oblivious as to how ineffective this campaign will be, and even more worryingly the Vancouver chief of police no less is supporting this because, and I quote 

“I’m not a medical expert, this is not my field. I’m an expert in public safety,” Graham said. “And if this will help reduce the crime rate — I’m all for it.”

If I may say so someone who is meant to be in charge of public safety has a very short sighted view of what will happen if the number of heroin addicts increases. (Which will happen if there is no removal of dependancies, fewer deaths etc, Darwin explains the survival of the fittest scenario!)

This program is in my eyes abominable, I do not know how any government, let alone the fairly level headed Canadian government can condone it.

written by Oli \\ tags: Addiction, Drug Use, Government, Heroin, Methadone, Mistake

Bacteria are the life force of this world, they help us digest, they breakdown our waste and of course they create our alcohol.

But Genetic experimentation has taken things just one step further this week.  Scientists have made and tested a bacterium that will eat a common produce, possibly even garbage,  and excrete pure petroleum.

Not only that but for all you Carbon footprint nuts out there this bug actually has a negative carbon footprint, that means that when these bugs are working they will infact consume more carbon than they excrete while creating the petrol. So could this really be a carbon reducing, garbage reducing, environmentally safe way to create petrol and remove America from foreign oil dependence?

Well yes, currently, ermmmm…. one catch though…

You would need a factory the size of Chicago to do so.

The good news is that the scientists who created the fuel pooping bacteria are working hard on refining the bug to increase its productivity and growth.  Who knows in a couple of years we could have home garbage disposal units that make petrol for us!

A man can dream…

written by Oli \\ tags: Environment, Future Technology, Gasoline Excreting Bacteria, Global Warming

I have been following the push of Carbon Credits quite closely.  Carbon Credits basically are an extra tax on any business that goes over a certain level of carbon emissions, based on things such as electricity usage and so forth.

What amuses me slightly is that

The Green Party are pushing for the Carbon credit tax and have arrived at a value

The industrial lobby have been lobbying for business rebates to avoid bankruptcies due to high energy bills.

People are complaining because their energy bills are already high enough, and there is a very real possibility that they will be hit hard by this (Energy producers create a great deal of carbon, the cost of paying this would be passed onto the consumer)

The Government has suggested that out of the estimated 7 trillion dollars raised, 1 trillion is sent to government debt, some is spent on energy efficiency research and the rest is sent back to the tax payer as a rebate.

Ok, so I look at this and what do I see, half the money going back to the industry, half the money going back to the tax payer, a whole load of red tape and extra burden on industries who will have to employ people to figure out their carbon usage, survive the gap before they get their research and so forth.  Meanwhile the taxes will increase by around the extra amount the energy companies have to pay (around $22 a tonne) but that alright because the consumers will get a regular rebate giving them their money back.

Does anyone else see the complete pointlessness of this latest environmental debacle.  I cannot believe there are serious political contenders out there who would consider such a farce in the current recessive economic climate, let alone a strong one.

I think I may move to Australia, last time somebody tried to introduce a red tape tactic there they were sent to jail for a minor offence of treason and damaging the economy, why does that not happen here or in the US?

Politicians are destroying our economy for their own selfish and misguided ideals which they have shrouded by their own self illusion.  Yet even when incompetence is proven there is no backlash, no fines or punishment, half the time jobs are not even lost.

It scares me.

written by Oli \\ tags: America, Carbon Footprint, Europe, Global Warming, Political Fiasco

As an ongoing penchant of the EU to run with the Global Warming Debacle they have once more made another uninformed and politically ridden piece of legistlation to try and increase costs to car users who drive cars with poor fuel emission ratings.

This is a move which has severly handicapped disabled and older people, as well as the agriculture industry and people who live in rural areas.

Many older or people with slight physical difficulties require larger cars, and the agriculture industry is on the verge of being reduced back to the ‘horse and cart, ox and plough’ era as tractors are announced to be non environmentally friendly.

But its nice to know that a European Conference of some of the worlds greatest minds spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of EU taxpayers money to decide that since requiring fuel efficiency to be included in advertising was not having the desired effect it should infact take up a minimum of 20% of the advertising.

Now did it ever occur to these people that many people need larger cars, whether its because tey have a family to move about, friends to give lifts to, goods to transport, people need big cars and no matter how large your advertising is it will not change the fact that a person looking for a people carrier will still buy a people carrier and a single person living in the city will probably buy a smaller car.

Don’t get me wrong, fuel efficiency is important and useful information when buying a car, but automobile advertising accounts for a massive percentage of western advertising, outflanked only by credit cards and followed closely by mobile phones.

Now imagine if these car companies are suddenly forced to  increase their advertising space by 20%, thats 20% more paper used, 20% more trees cut down.

This is scarily close to another recent move on Ethanol, a fuel only transportable by vehicles, where it was decreed by those up on high that gasoline/petrol created for road use must contain at least 5% ethanol, the governmetns even subsidised ethanolproduction world wide.

The result?  The speed the rainforest is being cut down has increased dramatically, with rainforest being burned down (Not logged) at an alarming rate for Palm Oil crops. Transportation of this fuel has greatly increased pollution in these areas and since 20% of worldwide farms are now given to Ethanol production third world countries have seen food prices rocket.

My position in this fiasco is clear, global warming has been proven to be part of a natural cycle caused by the Earths relation to the Sun.  It’s a simple fact that the Earth is in fact leaving an ice age, so bound to be warming up, its also a simple fact that carbon released by the sea increases as it warms up (Creating a nice relational graph, you can do an experiment in a lab to prove this)  and its also true that the graphs and data used to support global warming were debunked well over 25 years ago.

The money spent so far on ‘reducing carbon footprints’ numbrs in the hundreds of millions, and the new EU fund proposed on tackling this looks set to massively increase that.  This is money that could be used to help Britian pull itself out of recession and bankruptcy, it could be used to build new recycling plants, finally researching ways to make them more effective.

It could even be used to feed all those starving families in thirld world countries who have been condemmed to death by western incompetancy.

It seems however that we will just see more insane laws and advertising teling us to be ‘green’ while more and more of us fail to pay mortgages and thirld world countries slide into oblivion as they cannot even afford to eat.

written by Oli \\ tags: Carbon Footprint, Debacle, Environment, Global Warming, Government, Politics, Recycling

I was reading yet another story today on the myriad of Suicide Support Websites out there. These are not websites which try to stop people committing suicide, but infact encourage them.

From a personal standpoint I think it is everyone’s right to take their own life. So when the government announced it was going to make sites supporting suicide illegal I decided to look, and shocked though I was, the government was infact Right.

I took a look at several sites claiming to be there to support people who were thinking of ending their life. However a quick look at the members of these sites showed a much more sinister side to human nature.

These websites each had three distinct types of people.

Those Truly Seeking Help – There were some people who had suffered so badly that they were thinking of ending it all

The Predators – These came in several forms, none of them good.

The Attention Seekers – We all have one of those people in our lives somewhere which have threatened to kill themselves in a desperate bid for attention, the words ‘breeding ground’ come to mind here.

The most interesting to study here would most definitely be the predators. Many of them seemed to be living out their ‘suicide fantasy’ through either an attention seeker or a real suicider. They would first gently and then more forcefully shove people to what they should do to kill themselves in a rather perverted way.

They also sent hate mail, in rather vast quantities. These ones were not trying to fulfil a suicide fantasy, they were simply sad people seeking the feeling of power. As soon as I joined the website I was hit by a barrage of abuse that was obviously designed by these people to drive me over the edge.

The third type was sexual. Yes even by posting my real profile of 23 year old male, not the young schoolgirl type profile I got hit with an unexpected amount of emails coercing me to have sex, send nude pictures or perform an artistic show on cam, these tended to come from men in their forties of Arab origins, and was to say the least very concerning since a large number of site members were underage girls.

The Attention Seekers were the least interesting, they get shoved out of social circles in everyday life and it seems like they congregated here to try one last ditch at grabbing someone’s focus for a few minutes. These were fairly easy to spot due to their bi-weekly suicide ‘attempts’ and how publicly they announced what they were doing.

The Real Suicide members were those that really needed help. Many of them would shyly post about the pros and cons of a particular suicide method, while keeping the reasons for their intended departure well hidden. These are the people that really need someone’s help, someone to listen and someone to talk to. It’s a shame therefore that if these people suffered the same kind of abuse that I did then there is little doubt in my mind that they may be driven to suicide when they could have been saved and brought back on track to lead normal lives.

It is therefore my opinion that the government should ban the sites supporting suicide immediately, and also heavily regulate the sites that are set up for helping people who are on the brink return.

Currently the sites are filled with Sick Fucks and Attention Whores who need to be kept well away from those truly seeking help!

written by Oli \\ tags: Ban, Illegal, Internet, Murder, Suicide, Support, Websites

The raid on a polygamist sect, The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, recently has once again made the headlines as the Mothers in the sect claim that their children had been taken away illegally.

They have been making several claims about undue stress caused to the children and the problems they may be going through.

Personally I have some real trouble with this.

Yes, the government should try and keep children with their parents unless all other options fail.

However, I despises any judge who can with clear conscience send these children back to the ranch which in most cases seems to be no more than a paedophile ridden brain washing operation.

At this place children as young as 12 are expected to perform the full duties of a wife, they are told this is the right thing to do from the moment they are born.

By allowing this to proceed the judges are doing no more than condoning paedophilia and rape.

written by Oli \\ tags: Paedophilia, Texas Ranch

The BBC today reported on how rent has risen by aroun 10-11% while house prices are expected to drop by 20%.  When they interview landlords on this they give reasons such as increased market (People selling houses and renting for a while)

Of course they avoid the major issue on this.

The Reason Rent is rising so dramatically in some areas is because Buy to Let investors are in serious trouble.  Many of them have found rent not covering rather significant mortgage increases, and with few other places to turn they are placing the burden on their tenants.

The Reason Property owners are admitting this to the press is that it would be an admission of their own guilt

By admitting they are raising rents to keep up with mortgage prices they are admitting it is their fault, they stretched themselves too thinly over debt and failed to keep enough money in reserve to cover high interest periods.  For that reason when times get tougher they have no choice but to massively increase rent, despite the fact it carries a significant risk of putting them out of business.

Despite the facct that there are a huge amount of unlet properties currently on the market as people return to house and flat sharing the Landlords will continue to spout their bullshit to remove any possible blame to themselves, in the end however a lot of them will go bankrupt as the market normalizes

written by Oli \\ tags: Depression, Housing, Lettin, Renting

I read this article on CNets Crave today and was glad to see that none other than Harvard University have found that Violent games really do not have that much of an effect on a childs behavior.

Personally I have stood by this belief for a long time. I think Violence in a person is formed from their upbringing, their peers and their lifestyle. I think I first realised this when I was very young.

One of my friends at the time was from a devout christian family, his parents were so against violence that they even went as far as taking Red Alert off him when they found out it was a war game.

Of course from the outset he had an unhealthy obsession with guns and violence. The very shield that his parents ahd set up to protect him had infact driven him to explore the world of violence.

I am not sure how things worked out for him, his family moved away a long time ago. All in all though I think the fact remains that by preventing someone from experiencing and learning about the world around them can only ever end in disaster.

I think this is highlighted by several of the school shootings that have happened in the USA. These children do not talk about videogames or even violence on the news. They talk about how they were repressed, how they were kept off the team, how someone else got the girl.

The truth of the matter is that the personailty of these children was such that no matter what they would have ended up in some violent crime.

The fact of the matter is that the popularity of violent games is very rarely down to the amount of violence in it. It is down to the challenge, beating those around you and so forth.

Of course violence ina game is a factor, but its teh same factor that drives people to join the army. Should we get rid of our armed forces because they encounter violence, even if the majority are balanced, caring individuals?

I worry sometimes that the western world will become too nanny state. The Government will maintain a drakonian control and people will lose the ability to experience, we would become effectively no more than ants. Unable to do anything more than work.

In the UK this is already becoming increasingly apparant, whether you look at the new smoking laws, crack down on drinking, or harsh drugs laws. Then it pervades into your everyday life, telling you that you can no longer do DIY electrics in your home.

This government needs to rememebr that it is here to serve the people, not make people lead the lives it thinks they should.

Personally I think most laws are there to make you think before you break them, but so many people in our government are so now distanced that they do not realise that a multitude of laws are broken constantly every day by your average law abiding citizen simply down to common sense, not including times when people simply do not care whether something is against the law.

written by Oli \\ tags: Computers, Video Games, Violence

I was reading a story about a girl who lost her foot in an amusement park accident today here. I have to admit I have pretty mixed feelings on the story.

Firstly, the injury was caused due to poor maintenance, this was purely and simply the amusement parks fault for not maintaining properly. This Should be Fixed.

But what worries me is that the repercussions of this will go much further. The excitement of theme parks is in the, if only perceive, danger. With this perceived danger there is of course the increased risk of Real Danger. Choosing whether or not to risk this is of course a personal decision.

Personally I love theme park rides, I would be distraught if they were forced to become less exciting in the interests of safety, but at the same time I would be absolutely devastated if my feet were cut of because someone didn’t grease some cables regularly enough.

In the meantime, the sun is shining, I’m off to ride a roller-coaster!

written by Oli \\ tags: Danger, Injury, Theme Parks