Category: Uncategorized

Racism is not about colour, ethnicity or anything like that. I don’t think racists are concerned about colour schemes. Small children are never racist as they simply don’t understand such a concept. Racism is really about the clash of cultures and values specific to those cultures. and only occurs as children grow up and take on board the cultural values of their own society. Some societies are much more liberal than others and their citizens tend to be more open minded. In the West if a person denigrates Islam he or she can be subject to various sanctions on the grounds that he or she is racist. Yet if that same person arrived in a fundamentalist Islamic country and said the same things that person would be lucky to escape with his or her life. It is easy to see that some cultures and societies are much less tolerant than others. So it all boils down to the “Us and Them” mentality. Groups often define themselves by excluding and attacking others who are different. In fact, racism is never about race per se. It is about perceived differences that may or may not involve an actual threat. The perceived threats can be real or imagined. Nobody cares if a person is black or Jewish or anything else. The concern arises when there is a perceived threat to another person’s or group’s well being or way of life. In short, Racism is about many things but not race or ethnicity.

The Federal Labor government is doomed as it has alienated all of its primary supporters: – smokers, single parents, university students – the list just goes on.

North Korea a worry because of the question of Face.

Although I don’t think for a minute that Pyonyang will launch any nukes the tense situation is still a worry. Since South Korea, and gradually the rest of the world, is treating North Korea’s threats as a bellicose joke and basically ignoring them the leadership in the North risk being regarded as a joke if they don’t back up their threats with some fairly serious action. It would seem that the old game of threats, back down and rewards to the North is not going to be played any more. Therefore, if the North does nothing its leadership will lose face in a big way. Loss of face is a big deal to Koreans as it is to other Asians and to many people generally. This very fact ensures that the situation will remain dangerous.

It is a sad thing that our species focuses entirely on material things. Apart from the claims of various religions all actual knowledge (especially scientific) looks at only the things we can see, touch, feel and hear. While there may be no way of knowing if such a material world is all there is it would seem more than possible that there may be other worlds that we simply cannot connect with using our human senses. While there have been, thus far, no absolutely provable examples of spiritual life it would seem likely that many things exist, in one form or another, quite apart from our scientifically established world.

Tornadoes of any strength were very rarely experienced outside of tornado alley in the USA. Sure, there were odd whirly whirlys elsewhere and maybe a solid twister once every ten years outside of that chosen territory. However, last week we had 20 people killed by a tornado in Bangladesh and several serious injuries by another one in N.E. Victoria, Australia. The rational mind may suspect that human intervention on global warming etc has come too late and that we are approaching tipping point. Much as I would like to offer comfort and hope, I cannot without lying. No matter how bad things may seem now, worse is surely to come!

Greed + Stupidity = End.

China is constantly on the economic march with the excesses of capitalism showing up everywhere. Yet this is a state with many opaque agendas and strict controls over the freedom of its population. The Chinese government is keen to use many tricks to gain what it wants. It tries to increase its territory and power by constantly reiterated definition. The addition of disputed islands to the covers of its passports is one such example.

A more famous and serious one is the labelling of Taiwan as a breakaway province. The Chinese government desires the rest of the world to see its distortion of history in the same way it does. After the communists won the civil war in 1949 and the nationalists fled to Taiwan the Republic of China was reduced to a rump. Taiwan, in fact, was the rump of the Republic of China. Therefore, mainland China broke away from the Republic of China (Taiwan). It would be more correct to call China a breakaway province of Taiwan than the other way round. The Chinese government want to alter the world’s thinking by incorrect use of definition. It wants to possess Taiwan and uses definition as one means of increasing its influence and spurious claims.

Historically, Taiwan was never an integral part of China. The original inhabitants were not even Chinese. They were native peoples more akin to the Malay racial group. The second group of inhabitants were the Dutch who arrived at the end of the sixteenth century. It was only in the last 300 years or so that large numbers of Chinese people settled in Taiwan.

If China were to become genuinely democratic and possessed equal living and social standards to those in Taiwan many of the citizens of Taiwan may well be content to reunite with the mainland. However, as things are there are no valid reasons for China to attempt to coerce such a reunification.