Thursday 28 November 2013

A Beginning

I have to say that I have been thoroughly impressed by Pope Francis.

Since his election his attitudes and more importantly, his examples have given me the hope that the Catholic church is going to get the long needed reboot that its been waiting for.

O.K I'll admit that he's not budging on the Catholics stance on woman in the clergy or abortion.  Personally though, I agree that abortion has become too easy and that not enough thought is put into the fact that it is a baby that is killed.

Before someone else can say it, to those women who say "it's my body" I'd like to point out one thing - if your immunity system knew that the baby was there it would view the baby as an invading disease and kill it.  A baby is genetically different from both parents and therefore is a separate, living entity from the moment of conception.

However, in a change from his predecessors Pope Francis has said:

"it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations,... especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty".
"Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?"

That is more than many in the Vatican has given in the past.

However, what has impressed me more than anything has been his efforts to decentralize the Catholic church.  For too long the church has been this huge, distant figure of authority that nobody can relate to and therefore, don't respect.  Personally that is what has lead to the flood of apathy which is drowning the church in the so-called Christian West.  While the church is preaching one thing to the masses and yet is living securely behind it's high, rich walls people are going to drift away.

Pope Francis seems to be the greatest chance to change this destructive trend and I wish him great success in it.  If the church can reawaken it's original purpose i.e. 'those that have give to the have nots', then perhaps it can be the answer to the selfish agendas that the current crop of politicians seem to be set upon.  And even if it can't then I agree with Pope Francis on this:

"In his "apostolic exhortation", Pope Francis said he preferred a Church that was "bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security"."

The failure is not the one who did not succeed.  The failure is the one who didn't try in the first place.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Slamming the Youth

So it seems that the Government is now no longer content to blame immigrants, pensioners, disabled people and the unemployed for this countries problems.  Now they have to have a go at the youth of today.

A front cover of a Spectator September edition featured a sulky teenager being carried on the back of a speedy old gentleman.  Message = the youth of today are lazy yobs who rely on their parents to survive.

Excuse me?  The youth of today would like to have a job thank you very much, if the Government would make sure that there is one going.

Take for example the case of the health food shop Julian Graves.  Earlier this year it shut because nobody was willing to buy it.  So, sure, there are Internet alternatives but the Internet does not provide jobs on the shop floor.  Sure the warehouse and delivery jobs are still there but the shop floor ones are now gone so that's what?  A third of a business' potential jobs gone?  This was a perfect opportunity for the Government to make a economic and public relations coup.  If the Government had bought Julian Graves then those jobs would have stayed and the Government would have had a business, simple model of goods out money in, to help pay off the national debt, the debt that they helped cause.

The youth of today is being penalised at every turn.  More and more business are going solely Internet based so there are less jobs going.  With less jobs more and more people aren't buying so more and more companies, both high street and Internet, are shutting down, which means even more jobs being lost.

The Government says that it is plugging the gaps with benefits but it is cutting back on them as well so that's even less money to spend on keeping someone else in a job doing, making, selling the service that the people want.  Instead of trying to discover ways to make new jobs, the Government is trying to cut 'expenses' by selling off every public service it can think of. You only need to look at the train system of Britain to realise that this model of 'economic saving' doesn't work.  You just sent yourself up for a nasty collapse as the share holders demand the prices are pushed up so that their quarterly statements look good and then everybody starts using their cars instead because they can't afford public transport.  Come to think of it that can't help the environment either can it?  All those extra exhausts on the road.

A better model of 'economic saving' would be if all the MPs took a ten per cent pay cut and used that money to invest in a business like Julian Graves, a business that could then start exporting it's wears to places like America and Europe so that we could start paying of our nation debt.  Oh wait, a moment that would take common sense and common sense is just too common for the likes of the elites that sit in the Houses of Commons.

After all, why else should students now have to pay £9,000 for their tuition at University in a world were further education is becoming a must, where as fifteen (15) years ago they would have received it for free?  It is so that the little darlings of the upper crust rich don't have to mingle with us commoners because we just might corrupt their minds with the idea that every human being, from the lowest working class to the riches old money, has a right to a worthwhile job and a secure future in this world.  Now that we can't afford to go to University the rich are secure in their fastness while the rest of us slid into poverty.

That is why I applauded the youth of today, who using their technology know-how, have created websites, apps and software that they can then sell to the big companies such as Yahoo for a slice of the rich man's pie.

Well done to the Youth of Today, who keep finding ways around the road blocks the elites set up.  Now all you have to do is find the Holy Grail of science - a clean, renewable, non-polluting energy source - and we're away.  Then the old gentleman of Parliament can realise that the only thing he's been carrying has been his own prejudices.

Come on, Youth who's up for proving the elites wrong?

Monday 18 November 2013

Nyumbani

It sounds like a type of sweet does it?  And with what it is doing it could well be the best sweet in the world.

Nyumbani exists between Nairobi and the Kenyan desert.  It is a village with a difference.  Built around a central football pitch it expands out in sections like a budding flower that is slowly opening it's petals.  Each cluster of four houses has a garden and each house of each cluster has its own water tank.  Complete with a farm and rows and rows of trees Nyumbani is full of children, hundreds of them running to and from the two schools where the only 'parent' age adults come to teach during the day before going home at night.  For that is what sets this village apart - there are children, there are 'grandparents' but there are no adults.  There is a missing generation in this place.

Nyumbani is an experiment.  Africa has been gutted by two modern plagues: the AIDS pandemic and the food crisis but the founders of Nyumbani think they have the solution to both ills - house the orphans of AIDS with grieving grandparents and teach them the mixture of modern and ancient farming techniques which allows them to grow enough, precisely, to feed them.

Joseph Lentunyoi, a sustainability manager says:
“This village is unique”, he says. “You see we are not diverting the children into a quite different life, like other orphanages, but are managing to maintain their culture.”

There are thousands of orphans in the surrounding area and those lucky enough to be taken care of usually grow up in school-like buildings in Nairobi, sleeping in long dormitories far from their villages. Re-integration to rural life, at 18, is almost impossible. Nyumbani has another vision, which Joseph explains:

“The children stay in touch with their villages, which are near. The kids they secure their ancestral land. When the child is an adult, independent, they can go back to the land they came from.”
There are other advantages, too. “We place them in a family set up, which is of course an African set up.” Each grandparent will take on 10 children, and they share a home together which is provided for them.

There is a great advantage to this set up - mental care.  These 'grandparents' have seen it all; war, disease, famine, there isn't one of them that hasn't come their way.  They have lost sons and daughters and felt the bewildering chaos of grief, experience that they can then use to help the traumatised children that come under their care.

Africa is one of the few societies were age is the ultimate badge of honour and respect.  If you have made it to being a grandparent you have seen the world and your knowledge is the knowledge of mountains.  While 'parents' teach education, it is to the 'grandparent' that the child turn to for wisdom.  By enshrining that at the centre of the 'families' of Nyumbani, the village founders have captured part of the soul of Africa.

Out of the stability of the village has come sustainability.  Some of the children that went back to their homelands at eighteen have now returned as teachers and the village has reached out hands to the surrounding villages, both feeding them and feeding from them.  In this way it has become the model, in an insecure continent, for food security.  The simplicity and generosity with this has been done is mind boggling.

For instant, the village is too big for a perimeter fence. So instead the outer plots were given away to surrounding villages, which could then feed themselves instead of stealing from Nyumbani and what is more, sell the surplus back to Nyumbani.  Now if someone tries to damage this community, it is the communities surrounding it that leap to it's defence.

 “They have become our fence, but also our friends”, one resident of Nyambani says. “Once you put up a fence, they are not your friends.”

Local knowledge is used too. “We have a gentleman who digs the wells here and he has been doing it for years”, says Joseph. “He knows how to find water just using a stick. This saves us money – we don’t have to hire guys from the ministry of water.”

There was a long drought in east Africa between 2007 and 2009, particularly in east Kenya. But the wells at Nyumbani, built using modern techniques which sink water slowly into the soil, never ran dry.  These shallow sink-wells have fertilized the soil and helped form a microclimate around the village, which is noticeably cooler and breezier than the area around it. Growing trees is a long term project, nourishing the soil and producing timber to sell, while vegetables and the farm will feed the village in the short term. The place is moving steadily towards its target: self-sustainability by 2018.

Another benefit that the trees bring is that, once there is enough of them to cool the atmosphere above the village, they will encourage the rain to fall again and when it does the trees will help hold it to the surface.  The man who planted trees would be proud of these people.

This village may have been started with aid but a huge lump of its success is down to the ideas with which is was founded, the gusto that the ordinary, 'little' people have worked on making them work and the fact that some of the people who founded the project are still here, making sure that it will be able to stand up on its own two feet before they leave.

Sister Mary Owens, a nun from Ireland, was here at the project’s conception. Such a completed vision, she says dryly, is rare, as  other charities often come in only to leave again before projects are able to stand up on their own.

“The World food programme, for example, is now having to pull back. They worked in 3 month targets, which is too short a time to get anything done. Practically, there needs to be a much more comprehensive approach to solving this, and that is a government task.”

But with such success, just why is the village so unique? Joseph says government ministers have been to see the village, but have no plans to replicate it. “They are very good at saying yes. But then nothing is done.”
The concept, though, he says, is very straightforward: act locally, and use the resources you have.
“It’s really quite simple, but people complicate it. You need to work with nature and not against nature. The moment we work against nature is the moment we are preparing to die.”
“At the moment I am thinking about buying fertiliser from Nairobi, which is too expensive, is not affordable, is not sustainable, and I am preparing to die. Why can’t I just make my own compost? It is friendly to the soil.”

The concept is certainly working here. An artificial village?  Yes, but aren't all villages man made when you stop and think about it?  The only creatures that come close to building permanent 'towns' akin to the ones humans build are ants and termites.  Doesn't that give you something to think about?  A test tube?  Certainly, but when a test tube is growing something this healthy, happy and undeniably sweet you just can't break it.  Not if you love your fellow human beings.

Wednesday 6 November 2013

Murder and the Eton Scholarship Exam

Here's a brilliant one from the elites of our country.  To double check that any prospective scholarship candidate will fit right in with the sons of the country Eton recently had this question in it's entrance exam:


So to become the Prime Minister in the good old tradition of your forebears of Eton you have to be able to justify the murder of civilians by your armed services, when civil order breaks down because of your incompetence and acceptance of the quick buck over the long term good of your people.

Apparently the headmaster of Eton has claimed that "this was an intellectual exercise, based on Machiavelli’s The Prince, and was taken out of context."  Oh really?  I was under the impression that intellectual exercises where brain exercises used to prepare the mind to respond to situations.  The intellectual version of the combat drills you have to do when you are in the armed services.  So if this was an 'intellectual exercise' then it is obviously one designed to prepare the young men of Eton to defend the indefensible solely in the name of 'order' and the party's good.  In short to win at all costs.

It doesn't matter how many are hurt and killed in the process, as long as you win, or your party wins that is all that is important.

Then people wonder why perfectly decent young man get carried away defending genocide by poverty in these public speaking competitions, which are modeled on Parliament for the reason that the winners add another point to their chances of getting into that august body.  Those that are unable to defend their subject, be that nuclear power or abortion of the disabled, are taught that they have no right to hold political opinions.

The people being trained to be the future elite of our world are not rewarded for the humane, compassionate or even sensible answer.  They are rewarded for smashing apart the argument of the 'enemy'.  That's why we have politicians who are willing to argue on forever defending their point, even when it is blatantly obvious that their point of view is wrong.  That's how they have been conditioned to view success.  Success to the future politicians of Eton is measured in destroying your 'enemies' in any way possible and enacting any policy your party tells you to, no matter how many people are hurt.

What is more it is a self perpetuating circle.  The masters of Eton were Eton boy's themselves and will do their best to pass on their grand 'vision' of Eton tradition to the next generation.

This wasn't a homework question - it was a question in the scholarship examination.  The examination sat by the young hopefuls who want, or their parents want, to join the ranks of the privileged and powerful by merit of brains rather than old family money.  Most of the fee-taking schools have this system in place as they have to keep up the appearance of public conscience so they can hang on to their tax exempt charity status (yes, Eton college is actually a charity).  However, by including questions like the one above, it makes sure that the middle class swots it takes on are mentally mouldable enough that they can be fashioned into little replicas of their High Born class mates.

If you want to be part of the ruling elite you have to share the elites values and one of those values is holding on to power at any cost.  That's telling, isn't it?

Also one other thing, Machiavelli's 'The Prince' is a satire, not an instruction manual.  Do any of those Eton 'boys' understand what a political satire is?