Sharing is Caring

Ok so I promised I wouldn’t use this blog for sharing random flotsam and jetsam I find on the web. Well, I promised myself and didn’t tell anyone else so just to validate my reasoning for posting someone else’s great idea I’m telling you that anyway, but this is a particularly clever piece of work by someone I’ve never heard of putting the uselessness and emptiness of modern existence way more brilliantly than I could ever hope to.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

 LOLz etc….

 Funnily enough, I’ve just also discovered that the wordpress spell checker doesn’t recognise the word ‘blog’. Or wordpress. Conspiracy? You decide….

Crucifiction or Cake? Cake Please.

Listening to the radio last night, it seems that our new governing class were making themselves known again over the weekend. With a pianist (height not listed) having a finger removed on Dublin’s O’Connell St, riots and carjackings in Finglas and general mayhem in towns and cities all over the gaff, it was nice knowing that our patron saint is, as always, doing his best to drive the snakes back into the country via the dole que.

 Over the last decade we have seen a massive influx in foreign workers. Welcome to them, one and all. They have arrived on boats, planes, cars and trains (after the boat, obviously) and got straight to work looking for a job. Knocking on doors with a minimal (if any) command of the language, working hard to work hard, to send a few euro back home or maybe bring the family over so the wife can get a job as a cleaner that will earn her more than the paediatricians salary she is pulling down back home. They came and learned the language, or they came in tens and one learned the language and set the rest to work roofing, or block-laying, or painting, or anything that would give them the pride of a penny earned honestly. Last November two Polish lads came to hook up my Sky TV. The lad who rang me on Tuesday told me he would ring me at eleven on Thursday to arrange a time for the afternoon, would that be ok? I hummed and hawed, Ive been promised things by installation guys before, so I said ya whatever. Sure enough, Thursday at 11 am arrived and my phone rang, for me me to be told to be home at three pm for the lads to call round. I got home at quarter to. Five minutes later a guy rings me for directions. Three minutes after that my doorbell rang. Two happy looking fellas arrived out of a van, get this….

 They REFUSED tea because they were too busy.

Then they proceeded to lash into doing their jobs. They took apart my whole TV / DVD / X-Box set up, stuck in a Sky box and hooked it all together, actually making it sound better and somehow my X Box now plays through my surround sound, which it never had done before. They left as magically as they arrived (in good time) so I took the rest of the afternoon off to marvel at a job well done.

Which made me wonder this morning.

Those lads who were going bananas over the weekend, I wonder where THEY were, and what they were doing when those fellas were busting a gut to make sure they did exactly what they promised they would do. I wonder were they refusing tea so they could help make someones life a little brighter through the magic of digital TV? I wonder were they looking forward to falling asleep out of tiredness that night, happy with the thought of another hard days graft ahead of them tomorrow?

Nah. I don’t think so.

The law of the land has failed the scumbags as much as it has failed you and me as much as it has failed that polish lad who got a screwdriver in the head two weeks ago. A very good friend of mine died in a random attack last year and I wrote a rather bile filled rant on it at the time on a forum I used to frequent, some of what I wrote I’m not too proud of, but to be honest I’m finding it increasingly hard to justify altruism towards people who just don’t deserve it. There are people in our country, the country we work hard to contribute to who are quite simply taking the piss. They live with their hands out, get more than I am able to work for and live their lives on the pigs back with a few cans every night because they have piss all to do in the morning, and they are allowed breed with impunity to infect my children’s generation with the same warped sense of  correctness that has allowed them to be called disadvantaged. They are NOT disadvantaged. They have two arms, two legs and a head with a working brain inside, yet they seem to think its perfectly OK to let the rest of us do the work and “regenerate” the areas they have spent decades destroying out of plain and simple bad mindedness. I don’t see the logic in rehousing people who have no respect for what they are given. Social housing is supposed to be a leg up, not a handout and if you don’t want a leg up then you should not be entitled to one. Certainly not a second one.

The opportunities are there. There are training courses paid for by the government that can allow everyone to make something better of themselves. The system has failed them only by allowing them to get away with it for this long. The system has failed us by allowing them to act like parasites and make it a normal part of a (badly) functioning society. The system has failed the immigrants by allowing Johnny Skangbag to to accuse them of taking jobs that are only there because the Johnny Skangbags don’t want them. Things need to change and things need to be weighed more in the direction of tough love. You want to eat? Prove to the rest of us that you deserve to.

That rant is below, if your interested. It starts in response to someone asking as to when a particular area turned nasty…

 ——–

It was never really a nice place. My parents moved there long before I was born, and there were lots of young families being moved in by the corporation. It didn’t really take it long to start falling apart, even as a child there I can remember instances, like the time I was seven or eight and I got kicked in the face by some fucking gluebag trying to steal my bag of goodies on Halloween night, the alcoholic woman who lived across the green from us who used to leave her tiny children out in the rain, the local parish priest ran a community disco to give the kids something to do and the scumbags turned it into an organised war between themselves and lads from ******.The problem with ******** is, and this might not sound very PC but its what I grew up with and what I saw, you had a huge (for the time) housing estate just being plonked there, and people who couldn’t afford their own places were all put there.  I realise that this is a case of pop sociology at its core but the fact is that quite a few of these people had problems with alcohol, no job, no prospects and no real sense of the fact that there was anything better for them. So, I saw parents leaving their kids alone, with the eldest (maybe 12 years old) child taking care of the house. These kids grew up, got stuck in the same rut and are still living in ********, having never even been on a holiday, some having never even left Limerick.

We are now in the fourth generation of this, and the Gardai have become so frustrated and the judiciary so ineffective that these kids coming up have absolutely no sense of fear of any consequence. They do what they want, and now the situation is totally out of control. So what are the authorities doing? They are splitting them up. People in ******** are getting moved out due to anti social behaviour. Imagine how anti social your behaviour needs to be to get you turfed out of ********. The corpo wont house them, so they go to the health board who rent houses from private landlords in otherwise nice areas full of nice families with nice mortgages and nice jobs and plop this bag of scum in the middle of them all. And like a particularly insidious cancer, they spread throughout the communities and still live thier consequence free lives in areas where people are too afraid to even call the guards because make no mistake, they WILL make your life a misery for it. The WILL terrorise you and your children, they WILL burn your house to the ground and NOTHING will be done about it. You cant lock them all up. They all have an extended family who will wreak havoc on yours and most people are not the type of people who will go to war against people who have no qualms about burning your car with your children inside it.

So who can you blame? I try to avoid thinking that there are bad people. I try to think that bad people are simply a byproduct of a bad environment. But the more I see, and the more I learn, and the longer I live here and am exposed to this the more I think that some people are just bad, and there is nothing that can be done to redeem them. The longer I look and the harder I think about it the more and more I find myself coming to the same conclusion.

Wall them in, seal them off and if they want anything they ask fucking nicely. If they fuck it up they don’t get a second chance. You are on the street, and if that means your not being able to look after your children then they get taken into care and you don’t get them back until you prove your not going to be feeding them into the next generation of scum.

Desperate measures in desperate times. If your not going to act like a human being then your not going to get treated like one, you fucking animals

 

 

Jesus Loves You, for a nominal fee.

LL Cool J, the American rapper who abbreviated his name from Ladies Love Cool James when it became too stupid for even him to tell people with a straight face, has gone on record as saying he gives ten percent of his earnings to God. Yes. That’s right. He pays tithes in the form of 10% of earnings to the church because he reasons its only because of God that he has gotten this far. Now this has finally made clear to me the nature of the relationship between the ghetto and The Lord. If you get famous god will enter into an arrangement with you to keep you there for ten points. Fail to pay up, and you get charged an extra point in interest for every week you fall behind. Keep forgetting to pay? Well then God sends some of the boys round for a friendly chat.

Well, that’s just fantastic. I don’t go to mass, but I’m sure I’d have heard if priests had started giving sermons in Tony Soprano accents.

Now, don’t get me wring, I’m not a fan of religion, but I do think it had a part to play in society, not least that primitive people needed to think they were being watched in order to behave, for the greater good when the greater wasnt that great, and what we seem to be left with is the twisted and fiercly misguided remnance of a good idea. Play Nice Kids. Now we just have hokum, pomp and ceremony. I normally attribute the rise of pseudo religeous belief systems such as Reike, Astrology and all that to the decline in the traditional churches. I think that some people need something bigger than them to feel is between themselves and reality and, most of the time, to blame things on. Going back millenia people blamed a bad harvest on the local hag and threw her in the river to let the gods know that they were listening. Of course, these days people are supposed to be way smarter, thus less prone to casting out the local idiot so we can get more milk from the goats or whatever people milked in those days. These days we like to think of ourselves as more cultured, and more in tune to how the world around us works, so we don’t really need all this superstition and myth. A better man than me one remarked (and I’m paraphrasing, because if there is a better man than me anywhere I want him found and shot immediately) that the problem with the decline in religion is the fact that when people stop believing in God they will start believing in anything. And its actually very true. People spend a fortune on Psychics, who read tarot cards and shite on about how G is important to you, the victim looks unsure, so they say no, actually its becoming clearer now… an… eh…. is there older gent that’s important to you? So instead of saying, well you tell me, your supposed to be the fucking psychic, the victim says why yes! my father passed away suddenly in 1987, how did you know! and they run off and tell all their friends that the psychic was able to tell them that their dad died of a stroke in 1987, when in fact they told you nothing of the sort. They generalised and fished for information and you filled in all the blanks yourself.  

I’m always intrigued by this. Someday I’m going to visit one of these charlatans just to see what they ask me and what they can tell me about when I start making up answers.

I’m tired of people telling me I’m cynical. I’m not at all cynical. I’m actually very optimistic. I look on the bright side always and I rarely see problems, but I frequently see solutions. I’m lucky in the sense that I don’t need religion to bury my head in when times get tough, I don’t like the idea of shirking my responsibility towards myself and my surroundings. I feel we all have a responsibility to ourselves and each-other to try and rise above superstition and learn to take responsibility for what is essentially ours. Our world, our lives, our children, our helpless and in need. LL Cool J may think that prayer has filled his pockets, but I have yet to meet anyone who can tell me honestly that prayer has ever stopped them from being hungry, or cold, or homeless, or destitute. Its only ever made them feel better about being cold, homeless and desittute, which on closer inspection may be the whole point. I have some religious relatives who tell me that it has helped them cope and they would feel empty without God with them all the time. Well, all I have to say to that is that if you cant cope without your imaginary friend then maybe its because you don’t have enough real ones.

Its the people you can see who make a difference.

Toys, Prams and Throwing Things.

So, I read the big players in the music biz are bringing legal action against Eircom, being the largest ISP in the state, to try and get them to try harder to stop people from downloading music illegally from the big nasty internet.

Now, I’m all for a fair days wage for a fair days work, and I think if someone asks a fair price then they should get it. I mean, this might not be a very popular opinion but I feel that if someone relies on income from music production to put bread on the table then they are entitled to what they ask for within reason.

However, the likes of Sony and the major players in the industry have been making BILLIONS out of basically overcharging the consumer and shafting the artists that they sign. I can’t say I have much sympathy for the big wigs in offices who are feeling the pinch right now, its been a long time coming. The internet, and in particular sites such as myspace and vox have had the effect of allowing musicians, DJ’s and producers to peddle their wares in a much fairer manner. In the past, you needed to get a record deal, then you needed to get distribution and even after that because you had signed your rights to your music over to the label they owned it, leading to the result that five years later you could be sitting on your couch watching telly and hear your work being used to back a jeans commercial, leading to a number one hit for the record company who wouldn’t owe you a thing. It’s their song, you see. Even those who did make it to the medium time and were able to eek a living out of it, most of them found themselves bound by hugely restrictive contractual and financial arrangements, finding themselves forced to pay back the initial advance offered by the record company and sometimes driven to the point of collapse from being turned into a traveling sideshow forced to dance at the companies whim, long having the love of performing songs they now hate sucked out of them through the act of repetition.

In effect, the internet has given the musician a fair shot at becoming the market stall that sells good, wholesome home cooked produce despite the multinational superstore’s attempts to flood the market with generic yellow packery. Music has been given back to the musician and much to the gain of the music lover, its all there for the taking. Most artists will give you something for nothing. We don’t mind. We want you to enjoy it and if shoveling out a few freebies will help you understand what made us do it in the first place then take it.

And besides, I cant help but get the feeling that suing eircom for not controlling what people on their network are downloading is kind of under the same banner as suing the shop that sold the boots to the guy who kicked you in the nuts.  It’s a pointless attempt to impose a pathetic dying authority over an issue that has long since gone beyond your control.  

Viva la Revolución.