I recently wrote of the retail landscape in
Pontevedra. A friend of mine puffing on an electric cigarette inside
a café yesterday told me there were now 6 shops here dedicated to
these and everything to do with them. One of them is on the premises
of what used to be a/the sex shop. So Pontevedrans have given up on both
smoking and sex. I blame it on La Crisis. And the boogie.
A couple of minutes after writing "Sheffield
Wednesday" in a draft document in my word-processing software,
there was a Sheffield Wednesday page on my Facebook page. A
coincidence? I fear not. It looks as if someone has access to
everything I write. Thank-god we can trust the authorities.
Driving the 53km from the south of Santiago to my
home the other night, I counted 119 speed signs, or one every 450m,
or 415 yards. Quite a lot of braking, then. And plenty of
opportunity to earn yourself one of the ever-increasing fines.
Especially as the signs are not consistent with each other.
Kevin Myers is an Irish columnist whom I've always
admired. He's recently written a couple of heartfelt but controversial
articles on Africa. For ease of reading, I've copied them below.
Finally . . . RT News is cranking up its reportage
on the terrified Russian-speakers of East Ukraine and their demands
for a referendum on seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia. The
language now includes such phrases as 'an imminent bloodbath' and 'a
bloody war'. Of RT itself, Putin said in 2013 "We never expected this to be a
news agency or a channel that would defend the position of the
Russian political line. We wanted to bring an absolutely independent
news channel to the news arena. Certainly the channel is funded by
the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian
government’s official position on the events in our country and in
the rest of the world one way or another. But I’d like to underline
again that we never intended this channel as any kind of
apologetics for the Russian political line, whether domestic or
foreign." A complete failure, then.
BTW - This is how RT sees itself: "We are set
to show you how any story can be another story altogether.
Broadcasting over six continents and 100 countries, our coverage
focuses on international headlines, giving an innovative angle set to
challenge viewers worldwide.The channel is government-funded but
shapes its editorial policy free from political and commercial
influence." This, though, is an alternative view, one rather
more in line with the facts.
An Irish perspective on Africa : K. Myers in The
Irish Independent:
Somalia is not a humanitarian disaster; it is an
evolutionary disaster. The current drought is not the worst in 50
years, as the BBC, and all the aid organisations claim. It is nothing
compared to the droughts in 1960/61 or 73/74. And there are
continuing droughts every 5 years or so. It's just that there are now
four times the population; having been kept alive by famine relief,
supplied by aid organisations, over the past 50 years. So, of
course, the effects of any drought now, is a famine. They cannot even
feed themselves in a normal rainfall year.
Worst yet, the effects of these droughts, and poor
nutrition in the first 3 years of the a child's life, have a lasting
effect on the development of the infant brain, so that if they
survive, they will never achieve a normal IQ. Consequently, they are
selectively breeding a population, who cannot be educated , let alone
one that is not being educated; a recipe for disaster, in
evolutionary Darwinian terms.
We are seeing this impact now, and it can only
exacerbate, to the detriment of their neighbours, and
their environment as well. This scenario can only end in an even
worse disaster; with even worse suffering, for those benighted
people, and their descendants. Darwinian theory shows that biological
principles will apply to the human condition, in spite of all our
goodwill, and eventually, some mechanism will intervene, be it war,
disease or starvation. Talk about kicking the can down the road, as
the Americans say, about their budget deficit!
So what to we do ?Let them starve ? What a dilemma
for our Judeo/ Christian/ Islamic Ethos; as well as Hindu/Buddhist morality. And this is beginning to happen in Kenya,
Ethiopia, and other countries in Asia, like Pakistan. Is this the
beginning of the end of civilisation? We better not be around, when
it happens!
AFRICA is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from
AIDS. K. Myers in The Irish Independent.
No. It will not do. Even as we see
African states refusing to take action to restore something
resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the Begging bowl for Ethiopia is
being passed around to us, yet again.
It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob
Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's
population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.
So, why on earth should I do anything to encourage
further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where
is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things
saying that logic doesn't count.
One is my conscience, and the other is the
picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing,
yet again, at the camera,which yet again, captures the tragedy of . .
.
Sorry. My conscience has toured this
territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to
Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to
charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved,
20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty,
siring children whenever the whim takes him.
There is, no doubt a good argument why we should
prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual
system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the
other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.
It will win no friends, and will provoke the
self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous, hand wringing,
letter writing wrathful individuals, a species which never fails to
contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its
moral superiority. It will also probably enrage some of the
finest men in Irish life, like John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane
brothers, men whom I admire enormously. So be it.
But, please, please, you self-righteously
wrathful, spare me mention of our own Irish Famine, with this or that
lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of
the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30%. Over the
equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel
truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's population has more than
doubled.
Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its
madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another
fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing,
girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.
Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of
sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of
people who only survive because of help from the outside world.
This dependency has not stimulated political
prudence or commonsense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the
ascendant, with the president of South Africa being a firm believer
in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a
sure preventative against AIDS infection.
Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal
meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda,
Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera.
Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad
brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if
more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland,
Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured
worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa.
They are now -- one way or another -- virtually
all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its
vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to
anyone, apart from AIDS.
Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their
resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By
2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million; the equivalent
of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and
increasingly Protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.
So, how much sense does it make for us actively to
increase the adult population of what is already a vastly
over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent
country?
How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian
child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal
circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting
in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly
little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel
better, which is a prime reason for so much
charity! But that is not good enough.
For self-serving generosity has been one of the
curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which
would otherwise have collapsed.
It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly
a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the
continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of
personal self-discipline, that disease
is one of the most efficacious forms of
population-control now operating
If his programme is successful, tens of millions
of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to
adulthood, he boasts.
Oh good: then what? I know, let them
all come here (to Ireland) or America. (not forgetting
Australia!). Yes, that's an idea.
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