Samba – A French film with Omar Sy

Last week we went to see the very funny film Samba a French comedy but being French there is often a deeper meaning than just that. And so it was with this film. Omar plays a character who is from Senegal and who has lived in France for ten years. It shows the dark side of immigration, the lowly paid jobs and the risks run by desperate people. The film will make you laugh so go and see it but look at the other agenda and this isn’t funny. This is something that affects Europe and the US, Australia and even places like Argentina. Our burgeoning global human population especially in the mid latitudes is either moving to the north or to the south as they see the relative wealth of those regions. We don’t have a plan but we really need one. Go see the film and think about what is happening in both your country and in the world.

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Using technology and having respect for your fellow human being

I was in a supermarket the other day and was slightly annoyed by a hip and possibly cool young dude on his mobile whose conversation was being shared with many of the rest of us shoppers whether we liked it or not. What really really annoys me though is the lack of respect for the staff working in the supermarket. I saw this, let’s call him ignorant fellow for the sake of politeness, ordering cheese from the cheese counter whilst still carrying on his vacuous conversation. All people in our service industries should be able to say “I won’t be serving you unless you engage with me and get off your phone”. Mobile technology is wonderful, loss of being respectful is appalling. Every human deserves respect. And then I found this photo which I think says it in some way. It was taken in a small shop selling coffee and tea in Oxford, a great little place that had obviously been visited by the same sort of ignorant cool dude that I had had to suffer. RESPECT, it costs nothing. Copyright Paul Andrews and Caroline Schmutz, Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

The Rise of the Machines – Henn-na Hotel Nagasaki

I read today an article about a new hotel in Japan that is due to open this year. At first I thought that it was an April Fool’s joke but having carried out a search on the web it appears to be true. So whether I’m a Luddite or not depends on your point of view. I’m all for technology making our working conditions easier and for making the current working week shorter but replacing human labour completely for me is a moral outrage and if that is the case then yes let’s smash the machines. We have a surplus of labour that will only grow as the human population heads up from its 7.n billion people through 8 billion and beyond. Replacing human labour completely just enriches wealthy corporations, widens the gap between the majority of the world’s human population and the rich elite and creates a society that has even more exclusion something that can only lead to less social cohesion and more crime. The hotel will be part of a theme park and they are expecting them to be able to carry out 90% of the hotel’s functions.

It’s No Yolk Can Anybody Be Dumb Enough To Buy This?

I thought maybe that I had missed a few weeks and it was April 1st when a colleague pointed out this article in the Metro newspaper. Are people allowed to play April 1st jokes before the date?

I know that there are a group of people out there who are completely dumb, lazy, vacuous, rich or a combination of these things and that if humanity were mainly made up of these people then the human race would be rapidly heading towards an evolutionary dead end but this really does take the biscuit 🙂

There are some of us out there who can’t even boil an egg and as such are prepared to pay for a semi prepared boiled egg which still needs to be placed in boiling water. But isn’t that what you do anyway? This must be the greatest legal confidence trick going. Next up selling packaged ice to the Eskimos.

Check this out, the Yowk at yowk.co.uk. If you buy this and then complain that you haven’t got enough money you shouldn’t be allowed out on your own as you are dangerous to the rest of us so no breeding.The yolk is on you!

Appalling Journalism – they are all human beings stupid

It does make me mad when I read a news story about an unfolding human tragedy such as the current story about the potential loss of the Air Asia flight. In there among the facts that 162 human beings might have lost there lives one dipstick reporter has indicated that there might be a Brit on board. It is as if the other 161 passengers are not as valuable. When are we going to stop this crass reporting? If the plane has crashed then it is 162 human beings, men, women and children who have possibly perished. It doesn’t matter one bit what nationality they were, they were human beings first and foremost and my concern is for all of them not one of them.

We are all immigrants, we are all foreigners, we have no comprehension of time

The UK media is full of the hot topic of immigration into the UK and it is causing many knee jerk reactions most of which are illogical. In the world globally there is the great drift towards the cities from the rural areas and although I don’t have any figures on this it seems to me that people in the middle latitudes of the planet are either moving north or south depending roughly on what side of the equator they are. But this must be similar to what humans have always done. Some 15,000 years ago the ice sheet that covered the island of Great Britain reached as far south as the Thames supposedly. With that being the case how many of the 60 million or so Britons can claim to be related to the first settlers of this land and what does that mean anyway. Whoever those first people were they were foreigners themselves and their blood has been mixed countless times with the waves of immigration that have occurred since the end of the last ice age. So people of the UK, look around you, none of you have any true claims to be a native, you have just been here a bit longer than some. Individual humans and humanity itself needs to get a grip on some maths and some logic in that nearly everything you see and know is dated within the last inter-glacial period. There is a far larger question to answer than local immigration and that is the ability of the planet to support the number of humans alive today with an acceptable standard of living.

The Pantanal Brazil – Still Pink, The setting sun over the Pantanal

My partner and I have been very lucky to have traveled a bit and one of the places we went to was the Pantanal in Brazil. This area is the world’s largest tropical wetland area. As such it is a very diverse place for fauna and flora. We took this beautiful photo on one of the days we were there. You can buy a copy of it from our website http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk. Unfortunately, 99% of the Pantanal is privately owned for ranching and agriculture with perhaps 8 million or more cattle now eating it. Such heavy farming is bound to degrade this very special area and we hear so many verbal alarm bells from conservationists and scientists that most humans become immune, feel powerless or simply don’t care. There are some very simple numbers regarding us, humanity, and we can’t face them. So at the risk of repeating myself one more time. When we entered this inter-glacial (and exited what was probably NOT the last ice age) period some 15,000 years ago there were supposedly 5,000,000 of us. In terms of our “clean” water all of them would have been without it. Now there are more than 7,000,000,000 of us and still increasing and 780,000,000 of that very large number do not have access to “clean” water. As our politicians and nations kick the ball of climate change around while corporations and big business stop them aiming for a goal of living within the planet’s means there seems little hope of survival for beautiful places like the Pantanal. Think about the numbers, those 780,000,000 have every right to a decent life so how much concrete are we going to have to pour and steel are we going to have to make to give these people water, housing, roads, schools, hospitals and everything else that goes with our modern life. And it is not as if we have levelled off in our numbers for our global population is still increasing. I personally think it is time for a one child policy for the entire planet until we can get ourselves down to a reasonable number where we aren’t fouling our own nest. If we don’t then in a couple of generations those children will have as much chance of seeing some of the species of the Pantanal as they will of seeing a dinosaur.