The young and the gutless (nuts vs sledgehammers)

There are times when you just have to say wtf is going on in the world. It seems that some really atrocious things can occur without any sort of official reaction, while some other innocuous activities are reacted to as if someone was eating their babies.

One of the most obvious atrocities right now in my country is the case of the self-styled ‘Roastbusters’. Ha ha, very funny name little boys and hopefully some roasting of your nether parts is about to occur anytime soon.

For those not familiar with the news in New Z at the moment, these little lowlifes are a group of toxic teenagers who think it is (a) clever and (b) funny to get underage girls drunk and/or stoned and then gang-bang them. As if that wasn’t enough they like to increase the humiliation of the young and admittedly stupid/gullible girls by boasting about their exploits on Facebook.

This group have apparently been operating for a couple of years and FB would appear to condone the practice as their postings have kept appearing which begs the question about what sort of monitoring the social disease, I mean network actually does. But more of that later.......

Complaints were made to police when the media finally became aware of this group of limp dicks who must only be able to function with their mates encouraging them on. (Begs a few questions, doesn’t it?). However the response from police has been about as flaccid as I imagine these young scumbags are without their mates to encourage some kind of performance out of them, despite the fact these little needle dicks have made no effort to hide their identities. Police also reckon they have been monitoring this page for two years, but despite this they have managed to do absolutely zero about it.

Of course the lack of any meaningful police response would have nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that one of these tiny slugs is the son of a police officer and another is the son of Hollywood actor Anthony Ray Parker.

Thankfully not everyone in New Zealand is brain dead and I learn this morning that one of the pieces of excrement in this group has had his employment terminated now that his employer has become aware of it and a vigilante group has begun to form with the intent of delivering the justice the police seem incapable of setting in motion. I should imagine some suitably limp-wristed tut-tuts will be eventually delivered by an overpaid and out of touch judge after a few hundred thousand dollars of the taxpayers money has been spent on bringing these rock dwellers who will no doubt be supported by legal aid to trial.

Significantly Facebunk will of course not be dragged into any of this despite the fact they have allowed this page to continue for two years without interference.

And speaking of the gutless; the Jianqi Government has just bowed ever so gently to public pressure in regards to drink driving. For the last three years Labour(ed)’s Ian Lees-Galloway has been trying to push through a private members’ bill to lower the allowable blood alcohol levels for drivers to 50mls per litre of blood.

The Nats, most of whom sport ruddy cheeks and large bulbous noses with little veins all over their faces were dead against it. Of course their opposition to the idea had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact they are strongly supported by Federated Farmers whose complexions and hooters are even worse than those of the Cabinet.

As recently as only a few weeks ago Just Is Minister Little Bo Tox was ruling any change out for the very sound (in road safety terms) reason that it would clog up the courts. Funny how idiots can say things with a straight face that merely serve to illustrate how far off-beam their thinking is. Clearly we have a problem with the numbers of munters going out and slinging back the piss and then driving, for if we did not the courts would not potentially be clogged up, now would they?

Furthermore what sort of a message is the woman with the frozen face sending when she rates the spectre of an overworked court system ahead of road deaths and injuries? Once again Government was showing they don’t actually take drunk driving seriously at all. The many millions they have spent on (largely ineffective and pointless) adverts that are supposed to deter such practices are simply a box ticking exercise.

However a very good couple of Campbell Live programmes including one where several of his staff got pie-eyed under controlled circumstances showed the world how pissed you can actually be without reaching the 80 mils currently in force. Considerable public reaction to those programmes convinced the Government that with an election less than twelve months away it might be a good idea to go along with this one.

Having said that; their innate gutlessness and lack of commitment to the real issue has arisen once more. While the change in the levels will come through now its effect has been gelded by the fact that those found with between 50mls and 80mls will only get fined and a few points on their licence.

So despite the fact that we know t6he medical definition of intoxication kicks in at 50mls we will still continue to view those between 50mls and 80mls as slightly naughty school kids who will simply have to write a few lines. “I must not get caught drinking and driving.”

So while we live in a world that allows drunks to drive with little or no consequences and male sluts to spread their STDs among underage girls with no comeback from either police or Facebunk, I would like to share a local story that tends to fly in the face of all of that.

Finally some of you who read my blogs might have noticed that you did not get a personal message from me via Facebook to announce my last blog As above so below the link for which is here: http://philossifer.hubpages.com/hub/asabove . The reason for this is that Facebonk has decided in its infinite wisdom that I am a dangerous creature who should be blocked and thus everyone that I sent one to via a Faceberk email address was bounced back to me. Clearly expressing a (I think) soundly argued opinion about local or world affairs is much worse than boasting about one’s sleazy exploits at the bottom of the sewer. 

If you were one of those to whom I used to send these epistles via a Faceblock email and you still wish to receive these (apparently) dangerous communications, please email me at ken@writerman.co.nz with a suitable non-Faceblank email address and I will add that to my now somewhat damaged mailing list. Of course Facelessbook won’t reply to any emails I have sent them asking for an explanation for this situation. I expect their next move will be to ban me from publishing a link to this on my own timeline. Come the revolution, you bastards!!

Nothing like getting one’s priorities right, eh?

Time to sit up and pay attention

I believed for many years that life is about learning stuff. Good stuff and bad stuff. You see I believe our task is to strive for betterment. I’m not talking about money or position here; I mean making an effort to improve ourselves and our surroundings for the benefit of us all. That’s why we need to be alert to what is happening in the world, give some thought to what might be causing it, and if it is detrimental, try to do something about it.

Sadly, as a race we don’t seem to be too good at learning lessons. Over the last few months the universe has given us a few mighty whacks up the side of the head and our future depends on whether we learn from these events or not.

In the last 12 to 18 months there have been a series of major disasters around the world. This in itself is nothing terribly unusual, apart from the fact the scale of several of these incidents has been far greater than normal. From the devastation of the floods that spread across several states of Australia, turning what had been desert into lakes, to the current catastrophe in Japan, the world has had a bashing.

Most of these disasters would have happened anyway as they were usually driven by natural phenomena, but there are some important lessons to be learned from many and it is crucial we ‘get it’ if we are to avoid similar catastrophic results when these natural phenomena return with similar force, as they ultimately will.

So what are the lessons? They are all pretty simple really and what is frustrating is what needs to be learned is actually stuff that has been known all along and which has been ignored in the interests of expediency, complacency, and most of all, money.

There were ten major mining disasters around the world in 2010 resulting in over 400 deaths. Of those ten disasters, only the Chilean Copper-Gold Mine had a non fatal outcome and in at least five cases, there are serious questions about health and safety practices. But irrespective of this, there has been a large body of people trying to put an end to these sorts of operations because they not only make a serious negative impact upon the environment; they are also inherently dangerous for those working in them.

Do we have to kill another 400 this year before somebody ‘gets it’ and re-evaluates the whole practice of underground mining, especially when it is for yesterday’s fuel.

But it is not only the mining disasters we need to learn from. We have also had a clutch of serious earthquakes that contain within them some important lessons we should have already learned.

In my own country the city of Christchurch has suffered two massive quakes in the last six months. The first one on September 4, 2010 destroyed a lot of property but no lives, but the second, on February 22, 2011 was a different matter altogether. The final toll is not in yet, but it is likely to be in excess of 200. The town was already severely weakened after the September 4 event in which widespread liquefaction had occurred and thus the whole city was floating on a blancmange when the latest shake came.

But what is so sad about the Christchurch events is that warnings had been given for both of these events and they were ignored by those who could have done something. An Inside New Zealand documentary screened on TV3 in 1996 warned of the sort of soil Christchurch was sitting on and what the effects of this would be in a major earthquake. Furthermore many buildings had been identified as not being sturdy enough to withstand a large earthquake. Nobody in power took any notice.

Then on February 14, 2011 weather forecaster Ken Ring predicted a very big quake would occur in Christchurch between February 17 and 21. He was only one day out, but was ignored and then ridiculed by interviewer John Campbell who ignored the fact this guy gets the weather correct far more often than the Met Office. What’s worse I doubt anybody was listening when Ring also warned about March 21 and April 17 shakes yet to come. He might be wrong and I hope he is, but given what he has already been right about, it might be wise to take some notice.

The TV3 doco also reminded us of Wellington’s many buildings not up to earthquake standard. However, so far, the Wellington City Council is still sitting in that river in Egypt and claiming it is too costly to upgrade all the buildings properly. Current regulations only require strengthening these buildings to one quarter of the required strength, which quite frankly would be a waste of money, because it would make no significant difference in a large quake. Apparently mass fatalities are a much better option.

But what has happened in Christchurch and what is likely to happen in Wellington pale into invisibility compared with the situation in Japan. Now I really am on a hobby horse.

How could a country that suffered the world’s first known major nuclear event (Hiroshima) even begin to consider building nuclear power stations?

For Chrissakes they knew what the effects of radiation on people were better than anyone else in the world. Did the geniuses who decided to build nuclear power plants there think an accident couldn’t happen?

If they did then they must be the most stupid people to have ever breathed in and out. The bloody country is a bunch of rather small islands (the whole place is only 50 percent larger than New Zealand) laid out along a massive fault region known as the Pacific Ring of Fire containing 10 percent of the world’s active volcanoes.

When you think about that it makes Japan’s nuclear supporters as bright as that bloke that blew half his face off when he was siphoning petrol and lit his lighter to get a better view of his work. But the trouble is this is not a matter of Japan blowing its own face off.  If it was simply a matter of that, we could (perhaps rather uncharitably) say that if they are really that stupid, then it serves them right.

However it is not just their face they stand to blow to pieces; it is the possibility they will do the same to the rest of us, or at the very least leave us with some pretty nasty and untreatable scars. Thank god some men with actual gonads have warmed the treasury benches in New Zealand every now and again. Without the vision and tenacity of people such as David Lange (for all his other faults) we could well have had one of these ridiculously dangerous contraptions built in, for example, Christchurch and we might be the ones now threatening the entire planet thanks to our brainless pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Above all others, this is the lesson we need to learn and to teach or even beat into the skulls of everyone on the planet. Nuclear power is dangerous – far too dangerous for us to be messing with. We still haven’t come up with a safe way to dispose of the spent fuel rods and despite all the ‘safety precautions’ nobody can guarantee there will be no accidents, even if everyone follows procedures, which many don’t.

Don’t be fooled by these bastards. Always remember when businessmen and politicians start quoting the percentages on the likelihood of an accident they are simply playing the numbers game. They don’t give a toss about people; for them it is all about the bottom line, or as it should be called, the low line. It’s time to put the heat on councils and governments over mining and unsafe buildings and it is definitely time to stop any more nuclear power stations being built – anywhere!