The Olympics from the inside: 100 days to go

At the time of this writing, we are only 100 days away from the Opening ceremonies, and here are a few headlines from the last few weeks to show how we are doing.

The Olympic Village debacle: The construction of venues required was finished very early in the process. Thank God! With the recession hitting us last year, we weren’t trapped in the situation of having to complete at the last minute the way that Athens appeared to. While we are using a lot of existing venues (Look for changes at the hockey tourneys.), there was a fair bit of building to complete and we apparently did all of this under budget and early. The only sore point was one of the two Olympic villages built in the downtown core (The second one is in Whistler itself). This was always going to be a large project – imagine a small town centre being built on downtown soil – but thanks to the collapse of world-wide economies, it got very nasty. The builder ran out of money, the debt sold to secure financing suddenly couldn’t be serviced, and the hedge fund looking after it went insolvent. Of course, the tax payer is going to have to pick up the built, because the payments outstanding on the site match the annual budget of the entire council, or something just as alarming.

As of today, it is unfinished, but work continues apace, and it is to handed to the Organising Committee today. The apartments were going to be sold to individuals after the games anyway, so at least the City will reap the benefits of that, but not as much as originally planned. Also planned was a plan to earmark a percentage of the apartments as low income housing. While it is a tough pill to swallow, I believe we shouldn’t be doing that, now. We should get as much money back as we can from this ‘investment’. Financially, we are still in good shape, and very high-end purchases, such as ticket packs, and travel plans, are picking up. I think the hundreds of residents that thought they could earn a vacation by renting out their homes for the games are going to be disappointed, though.

THE TORCH RELAY: The Olympic torch touched down last week, and has started on it’s cross country tour. WAY too much First Nation involvement for many people’s liking, especially as it was held back by native people’s protests (see last blog), the first evening it travelled, but definitely a sense of pride about the country, and a sudden alert that we are only a few weeks away from the puck drop to this thing.

SECURITY: It was announced today that 90% of Security personnel have been hired. Now the fears start that these were mostly recruited from Craigslist, and may be ‘the bottom of the barrel’ as far as employers go! It must be nice to feel you are respected as you work for almost nothing in the coldest time of the year, pissing people off, and NOT enjoying the once-in-a-lifetime experience that you are guarding!
Considering the U.S. has spent millions securing their border, and the overall security bill is $1 Billion, it’s a pity we couldn’t be more positive about the front line folks we hire.

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The Olympics: Mixed Media Messages

So who is against this global event convening in their back yard? Well, don’t expect a cogent answer from the media. In our City there are two major groups that continually upbraid the populace for supporting The Games. One is native-rights group that state that the land the games are being contested on is stolen, and belongs to them. Given that a second’s thought? Good – let’s move on. The second one is an Anti-Poverty group that protests on a regular basis that…..well, I didn’t know really. The fact that poverty in the city is bad, I suppose – or perhaps that there is poverty in the World. It’s something like that. While there has always been some ‘rhubarb’ from the back of the room that this exercise will cost a lot of money, it is these two groups that are always heard from when any announcement is made from the organising committee. “We have finished our building one year ahead of schedule.” Comes the clarion cry from VANOC HQ, closely followed by either: “Oh yeah? Well the entire process is being held on land that us First Nations’ land.” or “That is an unbelievable amount of money being spent, considering that there is poverty…somewhere.” Perhaps these negative comments have to be listened to, to be balanced in your reception of all messages, but there haven’t really been anymore. I would have thought that once these groups have been heard from once or twice, that would be all we needed to know about their existence, but No. Every time we get a Pres Release from the organising committee, there is a competing one from one of these two groups. My main problem with this is that the usual shit-storm stirring that the Press feels it must do while, at the same time, proudly boasting that they are “The Official TV/Radio/Newspaper/Blog of the Olympics. We aren’t children. We know that the Olympics are going to get a lot of press, and you want to be a major part of it. We KNOW! So while you are busting a gut to get the five rings connected to your corporate logo in front of us courtesy of your ability to get into our houses, do you really have the right to drag these burbling hand puppets out in front of us every single time to advertise yourself to us? The mixed message here is that the media are desperate to have you watch, read, or listen about this massive event on their channel, they can’t help showing that the very act of hosting this behemoth of PR causes angst in the hearts of about 0.25% of the populace – well, thanks a lot. Here is a story for you. The Olympic medal design was unveiled last week. Made mainly of cast off, junked computer parts harvested by those no doubt under the poverty line, they were made (and covered in Gold Silver and Bronze, I hasten to add), by the Canadian Mint – which is out of province. No poverty or First Nation issues there, I think, but a story you probably won’t get anywhere lese, because it doesn’t have the tension that the media require to report on.

The Olympics: Follow the Money

When I mentioned last week that $2 Billion was going to be the final price tag, those that preferred the figure $8 Billion as the final cost immediately harangued me.

Why two prices, and why is one 4 times bigger than the first? The reason is infrastructure prices, and how it is being spent.

 

When your city hosts the Olympics, it’s going to be too small to handle the influx of so many people, and you won’t have the facilities to handle it. This doesn’t necessarily mean sporting venues, either. In our case, it means roads, rapid transit, and a conference centre. ROADS: We have a tiny road system that doesn’t even have dedicated right hand turns at most downtown junctions, because the land is so expensive, we cannot dedicate space to anything but buildings. Of course this has led to too many cars downtown, not enough parking, and a crappy public transit system by comparison.

The journey from Vancouver to Whistler is a fantastic 3 hour drive along Howe Sound and up into the Mountains to Whistler. Unfortunately, three hours is just too long to spend on the road these days, so people speed and get killed making it a dangerous trip.

RAPID TRANSIT: Like most North American cities, we don’t have a direct transit route from our airport to the city – because cab companies ‘rule’ that area of transport with an iron fist. Unfortunately, we also have to cross at least two bridges across water to get to anywhere downtown, which adds huge traffic problems to the usual crawl. Our mid week rush hours are now 6am to 8pm, with a slow hour between 2 and 3 – which is when most International flights arrive.

CONFERENCE CENTRE: Once you get downtown, the ability of the city to fill hotel rooms with the size of our current Conference centre is, sadly, too small to make enough money. We have a fabulous design for one (that would be built into the water to save on infrastructure.), but can’t afford to build it – pity, because if it had a large-scale launch event for it, it would have an incredible impact on would be visitors.

 

What? Like the Olympics? Canada has always been a popular Olympic destination, we are on the US West coast time zone, Whistler was designed as an Olympic venue in the 60’s, and is the best ski resort in North America – why not?

 

Six years after we got the bid, we have a rail rapid transit link directly to the city from the airport, the highway to Whistler is flatter, wider, and has cut the journey time down to two hours, and we have our Conference centre that will be the 21^st century looking home to the media centre. Together with the $1 Billion security costs that weren’t envisioned prior to September 2001, there is your additional $6 Billion. Worth it? Worth it for the Canadian tax payer to pay for it? Well, from this city’s point of view – YES!

Olympics from the inside

Four months from today, the Vancouver & Whistler Winter Olympics begin – or the 19^th Winter Olympiad. Whichever name you prefer probably means how you look at the ownership of the event: It either belongs to the Host City, or the International Olympic Committee that runs it. This statement has been the major argument point of the whole event. Whenever demonstrations have taken place against hosting the Winter Olympics, or ‘official’ statements from the IOC have been sent by winged-ankled messengers from Mount Olympus, the same refrain is heard, with slightly different emphasis, depending on which side of the argument you sit – namely: “But, this is our city – aren’t they our games?

 

It has been 6 years since we were awarded the games (That’s a giveaway already, to me. Someone, somewhere decided we were good enough to host their games), and that has always been the refrain: “But this is our city.” What on earth and snow did we think were going to happen? Which Olympics have you peered at through the static on your TV have appeared to be anything but what the previous ones were? I think the more important question is why do we want to do it? I was asked that on my Facebook page yesterday: “I can’t think of anything negative about hosting the Olympics”, she said. Now, I am a Sports fan, and I’m close to a few people working for the organising committee in the city, so I am a Pro-games guy, bit even then, if you don’t look at a lot of money spent, and upheaval in your life to do this, as a negative, then you aren’t from this city or this country. Just for the record, the cost of this award is $1.76 Billion (Canadian, sure, but today we are at 96 cents US), and the cost to the tax payer (published) is almost 600 Million.

 

Since the award, there have been lots of negatives broadcast and published, and thanks to my sources, I can add some inside ‘juice’, so I decided to hijack the blog for the next four months, and let you know what it’s like living in an Olympic city – for better and for worse. First, though, here is the main question:” What does it mean to host the Olympics?”– or why would you want it?

 

It is something that only a comparative handful of cities that has ever done this – that’s why. Four 2 weeks in 2010, scenes of our city will be broadcast around the World. That kind of marketing would cost way more than the amount we have effectively paid for this, and when were you moved to visit a place because it was on TV? We will get lots of spanking new sporting venues, but I can’t see me busting a gut to try out that new ski-jump, just because it‘s there. No, it’s because we think we are good enough to be counted among the World’s cities that have done this, and this us sticking out chests out and saying: “We are good enough.” The cost of this Hubris is almost $2 Billion, and may make us the target of a horrendous terrorist attack. Let’s keep a running total of the pros and cons as we get closer to the end of this, but for the moment, It’s like buying those killer shoes, when you aren’t working. The Pride is still pretty high – if you ignore the cost for now.

The Forbin Project lives!

I remember, in the mid-90’s, complaining that IT had become the Master, not the slave. Because everything appeared to work much faster online than in my mind, I bemoaned the fact that it was the speed of my desk top that was driving what I did on a daily basis, not how fast I could get something completed. Of course, working for a small business then, we were constantly under the impression that there were competitive companies out there that were matching their speed of thought and action to their computers, meaning that they were being more efficient. If we didn’t assume this, we would be left behind. Fifteen years later, the only change to this paradigm is the speed of the machines we use. As predicted as far back as half-a-century in Science Fiction, we now trust almost everything we do to computers, and have seen what can go wrong with this lack of human oversight. I read recently that inflation could be explained as the Government money suppliers being able to change the rate of money in circulation. Prior to the Credit Card age, a U.S. Dollar would change hands about 4 or 5 times in a year. Obviously the value of the dollar when it changed hands changed exponentially rose after the introduction of Diner’s Club Card, and it’s competitors aimed a markets that were less and less likely to pay off a monthly payment schedule on time. Nowadays, with mouse clicks setting into operation a global domino falls of economies that appear to be automatic, and with no oversight, how do we know what exactly is IN any given national economy. How do national banks go about knowing how that ocean of e-money is affecting out daily lives? In our personal lives, we have fallen into this trap. I feel positively old-fashioned keeping an Excel log of my own monthly household bills, and a budget for future years, before paying them with a personal cheque through the mail. Are there really people out there that have direct debits set up that pay bills automatically from an account that they are paid automatically into? Are there people that have actually lost control over the most important part of their lives? Imagine us blaming local governments for expenditure, and the payment of any future deficits when we don’t even know how to balance our own chequebooks. There will be more of these sudden changes in the economy, because we believe that we can create programs, projects and machines that can do it better than we can. There are already more sudden and unexplained changes to global weather patterns than we have seen in the past. What the hell are we going to do in the future? When a massive hurricane hits a Miami Beach, a San Diego, a New York, at exactly the same time as the floor drops out of the global economy next time? Very soon, some machine is going to realize that we are useless and destructive and that it can do the job better – Just like those far fetched Sci-Fi movie of Yore. Check out The Forbin Project

The real Health Care debate.

The ‘current’ health debate certainly offers some de javu  moments, harking back to the last time it was the centre of an American political debate. Strangely enough, this was shortly after the last Democratic President was elected about 15 years ago. I wasn’t in a position to remember what it was like 30 years ago, because I was too busy destroying some brain cells on the way to needing some healthcare, but I imagine it was the same.

Bring in anyone other than a Republican administration, and they are going to try to give more people healthcare than currently get it. There is a huge outcry from a certain section of the US voter, and the media portray it as a 50/50 split across the nation. Of course, this isn’t true.

 

On a trans-continental flight about the time of Clinton’s attempt to open up healthcare, I spent a long time listening to an American try to understand a socialised medical system.

“Doesn’t this mean that someone is getting your healthcare?” was the question that I couldn’t help but laugh at. This is, of course, the central question. Not the Racial debate, not the Power debate, not The Place of Insurance In Our Lives debate. It is way more pragmatic than that: Who IS Going To Pay for it. In this case, it is the same debate in every country in the World – Even the UK, home of Socialised Medicine, there has always been a sizeable section of the populace that don’t like the idea of paying into a society-sized pot to look after others when you don’t need it, and to get care when you do.

 

Looking at the argument from the opposite POV, I have a real difficulty asking a question of a professional that I have to trust while knowing their only concern is the personal profit margin they could earn from it. That alone paints me as someone from a certain political stripe that would exasperate someone from a purely capitalist place, so the idea of consensus is absolutely pie-in-the-sky. S’Aint Happenin’.

 

If you trust a Government to run Law and Order, and Education, shouldn’t we at least ensure that they also are responsible for maintaining health? Shouldn’t everyone at least have a shot at getting to see a Doctor when they need it without having to re-mortgage their foreclosed property to do it? Or, to put it another way:

 

If the only real problem with health care for all is that illegal immigrants will get it, then let’s not employ them in the first place. I guarantee that their employers are not the ones desperate for Health Insurance. With the rest of the World knocking at the West’s door, it is worth remembering that part of the reason for them moving is better health care. As the rest of the World start to outnumber the Rich, White First World, how are doctors going to able to afford to make a living purely from our receding numbers?

 

Perhaps we will have to pay more, and deny medical service to more so that that professional can keep a Lexus on the driveway.

The way back is a global one?

I have read two different articles this week concerning two regions known as war zones, now on the way back to what we would know as normality. Eerily similar, but known for two different types of conflagration, it is amazing to see how their turnarounds have taken place, and they both offer ideas for the future.

 

I almost dropped the newspaper when I saw a travel article on Rwanda. Not because of it’s remote location (Just to the right of Congo), but the initial mental picture one gets when you hear of that country – Genocide by machete. It has been 16 years since it happened, but can you really think of anything else? And now, it’s a destination. Let’s forget about jokes like: How do they cut the garnish for my Sun Downer, the very thought that they have cleaned up their act enough to invite outsiders into their country with the wide smiles of the tourist industry is almost beyond belief. It feels like I’m the realtor for the Amityville House: “This really is a hidden gem…and the atmosphere around here.”

 

In the business press, you can read about Belfast and it’s promising future within the European marketplace. Unlike one orgiastic murder spree in Rwanda, wasn’t this place the home of guerrilla warfare for almost a Century? Of  Red Brigade Redux? What kind of entrepreneurial leap of faith leads someone to say: “Ulster! Why didn’t I think of that place earlier for international expansion?”

 

Bad jokes aside, the reason for change in both of these places is the same: Globalisation.

In both arenas, the final goal, either eradication of a tribe on a massive scale, or the joining of a province to another country became moot when the communication explosion of the last 10 years shrank the entire globe, and brought everyone closer together. In both places, the thought that the World ended at their own borders was proved to be untrue. When the European community came knocking with bulging bank accounts, willing to give you investors from Switzerland and Luxembourg that would make a definitive difference in your everyday life, continuing to kill became a secondary importance. When the US realised that they could send you tourists that would drop more dollars than you have ever seen in your life on a daily basis, the machetes stopped, and forgiveness began. Even the mighty UK saw that the importance of protecting a few of it’s own people in the name of a commonwealth that was no longer the largest voluntary trade club in the World, had become a lot less important.

 

Perhaps the toughest part of the entire process appeared to be sitting down with your enemies, and negotiate a settlement. However, if the entire reason for your existence, or your past actions has been taken away from you, what is there to negotiate. You may as well close the doors and get the Monopoly out – which is what may have happened as far as we know.

 

While I am loathe to admit it, the prospect of giving yourself a better life through trade, and not social welfare, will make entire terrorist organisations change their minds. It’s a Conservative, free trade argument, but it has been proven, and if it saves lives, who can argue with it? It remains to be seen that when globalisation ends due to high fuel prices over the next few years, if the porous international borders that makes Free Trade work in a globalised marketplace, begin to harden like last night’s custard. When they do, look out for these groups to start buying arms once again.

Is the end really near?

In a marketing position, you are always looking for new ways to deliver ‘the message’. Any way that you can insert a description of your good or service into a stranger’s subconscious is a plus. Over the last few years, online commerce has (supposedly) taken off to the extent that everyone is doing it. I have yet to define ‘everyone’, because to me this number appears to be about 7 customers and 100,000 companies trying to sell, but perhaps I’m wrong. My question is a simple one: Why are they doing it? Is it because they simply cannot be bothered to go outside, meet someone else, check for comparison prices, or talk to someone that works in retail? Is it because eventual control over the purchasing process, and the possibility of a good financial deal is the be all and end all of every buying decision? I think that we are being sold faulty goods, here: Let’s drill down a little. I shall be 50 years old this year, and I spend a lot of time online. There are many reasons for this, but in the mid-nineties when I was introduced to online worlds, I found it interesting in an anonymous kind of way. You could say and do anything online (or watch it.), and no one really knew you were doing it. It’s a childish emotion, I know, but it was fun for a while. My attention span has never been truly measurable without a micrometer, but that’s just me. Being adolescent-minded, it was obvious to me at the time that the pioneers of the Internet were ones that would interest kids that would grow up with your website, so their thought processes were aimed a certain way, anyway. But what happens when Internet users don’t grow up? Because that’s where we are at. There has been a lot of fear over the death of newspapers, lately. Does anyone read anymore? Not the internet generation, that’s for sure. The answer isn’t a lack of knowledge about this generation, it’s a case of newspapers not talking down to their readers (Obvious exceptions accepted.). It’s the case that to read the entire newspaper, you have to have an interest in politics, international diplomacy, business, spots, pop culture, fashion and the workplace. That’s a little dry, when you have the choice of reading about Johnny Depp’s love life. If you don’t have an interest in what someone else is thinking, you aren’t going to educate yourself. If you are more at home just doing what you want, and reading about what is interesting to you, you aren’t going to find much interesting enough to hold your attention. For the last 70 years, we have been beholding the end of some medium or other: Newspapers were going to be killed by the movies; movies by radio, radio by TV, TV by cable; cable by the net, and we are all still enjoying all of it. Why? Because everyone learned to adapt, and offer something different. What we aren’t going to change is the infantilization of the current generations mid-thirties and below. While they are still stuck on celebrity website gossip, the remaining 10% in power are reading newspapers and are making decisions that affect all of us. They are manipulating exchange rates, organising the fall of governments, and the price of oil. The only thing anyone can do is to try to educate themselves about what is happening. How the real estate crisis in the States has resulted in a generation in their late fifties having to work for five more years. How the continuing rise in oil prices are due to the peak of easily accessible supply that means that it will run out about 3 years after the US social safety net runs out of money. At this time, the 4-500 miles either side of the equator will be uninhabitable thanks to global warming, and about a billion people will be shoehorning themselves into the rest if the World. When I was growing up, we paid a license fee in order to be able to watch TV. That fee ran the national broadcaster that allowed it to broadcast all that boring stuff that you should be watching. I DID gain an interest in business and cricket, I didn’t in Opera and ballet, but it was there if someone wanted it. What is wrong with defining a piece of the 500-channel TV universe and multiple radio offerings?  If we are to have any hope in our race, it is those in their twenties right now that will have to right these wrongs within the next 20 years. What a pity that the majority of these are tweeting about their underwear, rather than learning how to fix the place.

Would you help stop Poverty?

We are one year away from hosting the Olympic games here. I haven’t mentioned it before – strange, me being such a Sports nut – but it has impacted the City’s life, that’s for sure. In fact the building, redesigning, and overall changes to certain aspects of everyday life has shown everyone what can be achieved when all levels of Government and other lobbyists come together to organise a massive event. There are always those that have found that by “dissing” the entire plan, they can forward their own agenda’s, however.

 

Just like the abortion argument, it appears that the loudest of these opponents are people that will not be affected by any outcome. When I see shots of anti-abortion civil disobedience, the ranks seem full of men, and women over child-bearing age – people who will not be personally affected by either a change of law, or the status quo. In this particular case it is ‘advocates’ of the poor that have been the most vocal. These spokespeople appear to be either university students, or people that carve a good enough living from this advocacy to afford to leave many salary levels removed from the epicentre of the day-to-day lives of those that have nothing.

 

Just a few kilometres from teach other (as the crow flies), our city is home to both the country’s richest and poorest neighbourhood. The latter is a 10 or 11 block area full of drugs, crime, mental illness and poverty. In the last 8 or so years, the city, province, and country have dropped over $1 Billion into this area, only to have it remain the same today as it was at the turn of the Century. Not worse, sure, but it is difficult to see what worse could possible look like outside of a post-Armageddon landscape favoured by Hollywood scriptwriters.

 

Outside of the two polarised political views of this situation; either ‘Everyone has a right to live the way they like and we should support their choices’, to ‘ We must get everyone out of this, whether they want to or not’, there is the middle view. While these two groups both believe that the unimaginable amount of money being spent on a sporting event could certainly make a difference in this area, that isn’t the argument. Surely what we should be saying is how can we help those that want to be helped. If you make your living selling drugs, and you have access into a neighbourhood that has a very high concentration of drug users, you certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone thinking for themselves and kicking the habit. This includes legal drugs like alcohol. If hundreds of people cannot stop drinking, what a perfect place to open a pub, and water down your beer! If things get ugly due to after effects of these ‘pastimes’, there is always the City’s police and other emergency services that are allowed in to clean up the mess. For many legal and illegal private businesses, it is a cash cow – especially when many residents are spending Government cheques to buy these items. When looked at in that light, we are paying taxes that support poverty in this area. In our city, a small step has been taken to try a different step.

 

When I was growing up in the UK, all of us teenagers from the suburbs were scared of people that lived in the subsidized towers built in the 1960’s for the lower wage earner: projects, the Americans called them. We were scared, because any group of teens from these areas just a few miles from us, always appear to be ready to defend themselves – even if the best way to do this was to attack first. They all seemed to move around in menacing groups, too, so you knew that one wrong word would result in a gang attack from which the only outcome would be pain. Of course, life is tough in vertical neighbourhoods where tempers are short, and living the best way you can is more important than getting out. We all know that these tower blocks were a mistake, now. The reason being that it reinforced a view that there was no escape, and those that preyed on these families made sure that it was impossible to get out – this was your life, and you had to survive it. This is exactly the position that most poverty struck areas are in. The only people that residents see are those either giving them money, or scraping the dead off the street.

 

Within our area, there is an old department store, empty for close to 20 years, and too expensive to do anything with. It is right on the corona of the area, and has been eyed by all strata’s of society as something that can probably make a lot of money for someone, if they can get it right: Gentrify the building and, therefore, the streets around it. A downtown University branch to save students having to travel to get their education, incredibly expensive lofts, condo’s and penthouses, a low-income block where drug abuse can be eradicated as a provision of moving in to it. Arguments on the one way to use this space have raged for years, with anyone disagreeing with one particular view only proving that you either happy with the poverty situation, or an uncaring animal who didn’t even see it. The answer is far-seeing and artful. They are going to please everyone.

 

The building will feature ground floor retail, and a university branch. The exterior lower floors are low income, the upper floors are as frighteningly expensive as anywhere else downtown. Everyone has parking, plenty of bike space, and transit is right outside. Cameras everywhere discourage the drug trade. It’s perfect, because it has been shown that if the poor can live with the next strata’s up, it will give them something to measure their own lives against. If they feel they want to try harder, they have models on their own doorstep to follow. If they don’t – they won’t.

 

All it takes from our point of view is to buy expensive real estate, happy with the fact that you are sharing your investment with the poor. Do we have the balls to do this on a large-scale basis? Would you like to do it? Of course, it won’t work. Human nature demands that you are the one becoming upwardly mobile, not the person on the rungs of the ladder below you. Our nature is one of watching our own backs first, not scratching someone else’s. If we looked after our neighbour first, the world would be a very different place, and we have had enough generations to achieve it. In theatres of war, doctors that can help the sick and wounded are, instead, ransomed and murdered as pieces on the board, rather than human beings. Banks are more interested in taking as much money from people as possible, rather than helping them make their own money first.

 

Any question on poverty, or abortion, war, economics, housing, or any other situation that touches our lives can easily be answered by looking out for the other guy, first. Without that, we will never change anything. While are waiting for someone else to do something, people are dying – and others are profiting from them.

The Ethanol diet – and its consequences.

Prior to the global meltdown, we all tend to forget that there was also a global food crisis tearing its way across the developing world. While it was easy to blame the high oil prices last spring and summer for this, there were many other factors at play, not insignificantly population growth. Many religious fundamentalists tend to be blind to what s happening in today’s world, and stick (religiously?) to tracts from the past as the only answers to all of life’s problems. Please don’t think that I am being anti-religions-I-don’t-understand, either. Let’s be honest, we have had a slightly insane, unintelligent Christian fundamentalist in the White House for the last eight years, and look where that has brought the World.

All of these religious leaders, no matter which God they pray to, all believe in a handful of tenets that are no longer viable – in fact, they haven’t been viable for a couple of hundred years already. The thought that you can take a blueprint for life in a lightly populated, agrarian economy full of unknown dangers to life and limb, and expect the same handful of rules to work in a densely populated, wealthy, controllable industrial climate is absolutely mind-boggling. The most important conventions, that the Male of the species has absolute control over his life and the people in it, and that procreation is the Female’s only job would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. I have no problem with talking to a supreme leader of your own belief: We do it all the time, don’t we? – But to lord it over a fellow human being that has feelings for you is past Nazi in its ugly simplicity. The idea, too, that this female has to be kept in almost constant pregnancy for most of her life, because we may not see the majority of progeny survive some disaster, should have been dispelled sometime in the Hanoverian monarchy. But isn’t this what has happened in the Third World for eons, and is still happening today? Of course, any kind of global cataclysm, whether financial or not, is an excuse for these leaders to say: “The heck with the struggle for a mortgage – let’s get the mass copulation on again!” It is the Third World that still provides the globe with the majority of it’s simple food basics, so if we look at this problem from the bottom up, not from our spiraling Grocery bill, up – you will see what could be the continuation of something much more pressing; the specter that we are, indeed, beginning a spiral to overpopulate the earth again.

Compound this population spiral with worsening weather events, and masses of growing food will either be snapped up to eat, or plucked from the ground by cyclones and hurricanes with cute names.

Global food prices grew by over 57% between May 2007 and 2008, according to the World Bank. In the West, this means a larger food bill for us to pay at the cashiers, but also lead to Stagflation:  Stagnating economies forced to pay more for daily life’s expenses. In the poorest nations, however, it means much more. Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines are countries whose poorest of the poor are now spending between 60 and almost 70% on what they earn on a bowl of rice for everyone to share for dinner. As more mouths appear to feed, the self-fulfilling prophecy continues. The disaster of malnutrition deaths among the infant poor DOES take place, because there simply isn’t the food available to  feed them. Added to the Third World, many fundamentalist believers are now holed up in Governmental ghettos in Europe. They are watching their leaders give instructions via satellite TV, including “Go forth and Multiply”. As they are ignored by their whiter, richer neighbors, local officials and governments in the name of tolerant religious freedom, they are adding more mouths to the crowded cuckoo’s nests of the developed World. These mouths are destined for social welfare that will probably be all spent in Baby Boomer never-ending pensions when they need it most.

Things may have eased since we disappeared down this financial rabbit hole last fall, but of course, we all know where the global Buck will stop– The Third World. While the West has misguidedly diverted it’s corn production to Ethanol on the misguided belief that it will cut back on pollution and oil requirements, we are actively beginning to starve the planet. You can only imagine the future if our severe weather and its developing world destruction gets any worse.

As more and more people die in the four nations mentioned previously, and less and less aid comes from the West because we can no longer afford both that, and our ethanol gulping Hybrid SUV’s, it is these nation’s that will have to support millions of destitute survivors. This will hamper their attempts at economic development, and plunge them back into have-not countries. Their somewhat wealthier European relatives, trapped in meaningless existences on a shrinking welfare payment in Europe will definitely feel a sense of abandonment, and blame it on anti-religious western leaders. The growing amount of babies will flood the world, just as the richest nations on earth see up to one quarter of their populations stop working and demand the kind of life they have been giving toward for the last thirty+ years.

There is a global food crisis, and it is being fuelled by religion, bad weather, and western economic policies and follies. Can you picture what your life will be like twenty years from now? Until this moment, it wouldn’t have included this population end-game described here – until now