The News Show

By Roger Colins

Civilisation has gone as far backwards in morality as we have forwards in science. The very posture of pious, modern society could not make it any clearer that barbarians have higher moral standards than we do.

The cold blooded, hypnotising snake is but an amateur.

Just because millions of starving, mosquito ridden, disease infested children aren't dying on our doorstep does not mean that we aren't letting it happen.

This kind of hypocrisy could just about have been excused when we didn't know what was going on in the world. Those that would come back from war with stories beyond belief, explorers that returned from the sea with tall tales of giant sea monsters weren't likely to be believed and when I first saw a news broadcast as a child my soul quite immediately decided for certain this could be nothing other than sheer, fantasy.

My parents would not have allowed these things to take place, they wouldn't even let me be late for school. The same therefore goes for every other adult that went around telling me what to do. They'd all been entrusted with a responsibility over my life and had to live up to it, which included the news show. It too was a part of my life now. Therefore, this news show could not be telling the truth.

 
My Tablet

From there we arrive at a space age alarm clock going off at half past five. A hot shower, coffee, breakfast and smoke before horror strikes as the realisation dawns. Out of our of a collection of three hundred garments, we just can't decide what to wear and are already late for work. We stare long, just at that one collection. In the back of our head we hear 'I earned this.' Get up early every day, put on a big smile and work like a drone to pay for it. 'I deserve it.'

Hypocrisy sounds curiously similar to the Greek, Hippocrates. You've probably heard of the Hippocratic oath and may even have some notion of what it involves and yet, those that have gotten this far will still admit they don't want to hear it and those that haven't, are already watching a video of a funny cat.

Why not, here it is in full:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art — if they desire to learn it — without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but to no one else.

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgement; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favour of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

If I fulfil this path and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honoured with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

Murder

Two things happen when you kill for the first time. You'll vomit, and then you'll explore an overwhelming sensation of power. It feels good. This is not dissimilar to when you got your first pay check. Something inside you managed to count how many people died for every last penny you earned and made you feel sick. Then that cool feeling of God like power washed over you, and the feeling of sickness was forgotten.

I'm not talking about animals or fruit or an accident or self defence. I'm talking about deliberately taking a human life. One six year old girl dragged thirty kilos of copper twenty miles from a mine to an airport across a stretch of war torn land.

Her pay check is survival. She deserves to do it again until she fails to earn that pay check next time.

A five year old boy then manipulated that copper into wires in a toxic furnace halfway across the world. His pay check is a bowl of rice.

An insane, ten year old girl then puts that wire into a computer circuit on the other side of the city. Her pay check is in actual money.

That circuit is put into a computer by another, that computer is packed into a box made by another and those boxes are loaded onto trucks, trains and planes by another.

When the boxes land at their destination there are machines and robots to pick them up and move them into that shiny high street shop where a fat, peaceful, charitable, enlightened, educated, happy, well paid, insured, knowledgeable, well balanced and all around nice husband and father takes your credit card and you've got a brand new tablet. You feel like God. You feel this way because as far as this world is concerned, you are.

#hypocrisy #morality #civilisation

A Stab At The Future

By Roger Colins

Assuming that we are essentially good people underneath it all, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what we could accomplish in the next year, ten years or fifty years.

The reason I start off by reminding us of our innate goodness is to say that each day that passes, all things considered, we're doing better than we were yesterday. Some things fall by the way side, mistakes and accidents happen but overall, I would like to think that our forward motion outweighs our back pedalling.

We've always heard the old man hark that the world is going to hell, profits claiming that the world will come to an end on such and such date. I'm feeling optimistic. Maybe because I don't believe everything I read but mostly it's becasue I'm not an optimist at all, I'm a realist.

The world hasn't ended yet.

Saying when the world will end, is just a waste of time and wasting time is definitely going backwards.


Know Your History

From where we were a hundred years ago, some things have changed for the better and some for the worse. War still rages on and for the time being I don't see that changing but so far as world conflict, I'd say we've done well not to start world war three. That's a positive.

A hundred years ago there was also the Great Depression. Even though we've experienced something similar quite recently, the situation has most certainly gotten worse since 1930.

New diseases will keep cropping up. WHO claims that cancer is on the rise and yet we are curing more of the damn thing everyday and will continue to do so. We're not going to just stop.

Famine has almost certainly gotten worse. Out of the days of empire the indie nations were granted the freedom to starve and left to do so but the technologies that can get charitable aid to them have improved.

Our fantabulous internet lets the world know there's a crisis going on and floods of donations can help save a life or two when it happens. It is still nowhere near ideal but we're getting better at it.

Medicine, technology and food, the sciences are quite simply keeping us all alive and perhaps they can help us in the future to deal with these other challenges that still go unattended.


Ten Years Time

Location. I despise tag lines and try to think up new one's of my own but this one fits. It's important to consider that even ten years ago there were still corners of the world going unadulterated. For the next ten years this will no longer be the case and be an astounding first for civilisation.

Having coloured in the map and connected all the dots we'll have no other choice than to address concerns outside of the scientific sphere, and begin a deliberate effort to bring them into it.

Communication will have to play the supporting role as the English language spreads even more widely to develop relations where none were possible before.

Two previously incoherent people will be able to sit down together and hash out some plans for the future. The walls that stood between them in the past rather rapidly transform into bridges.

Having filled in the blanks and built our bridges we come to what will happen next and speculate on the worth of our will power. No doubt that in ten, twenty, fifty and more years time there will be new dilemmas and problems to face but we'll have to begin with people, because that's where we will have gotten.


Population

When you consider that there are more people alive than dead, it's quite a harrowing concept to wrap one's noggen around but the claims that over population is a problem, seems brutish.

At one point there were about forty thousand of us left on the planet, but we managed to carry on. Should there be discovery to cure ageing we may indeed face a brand new incarnation of the monster but until then, we'll still have the earth to till and plenty people to do it. 

Housing has to come next. Architects are told that they will always have a job, even if they'll be programming computers to do it for them. There's plenty of space left in the sky, space underground and all around.

While our designers, engineers and labourers may have their work cut out for them, the same rule applies that there's plenty of people to build houses as there are farmers to grow crops.

Over population would probably be more of a concern two hundred years from now but so long as the premise holds for the next twenty to thirty years, we really should have thought up something along the lines of terraforming other planets by then or something else far beyond modern imagination.


Two To Three Decades

Moving onto twenty years from now we'll probably find ourselves addressing the problems humanity has been dealing with for a slightly longer time.

Pollution of the environment we live in probably won't be tolerated by those that sat around the table ten years earlier. The power companies might seed us with the idea that oil is running out today but I can promise you, there's still enough of the juice left to turn the sky black and burn the planet to dust.

Once the idea of eradicating polluting energies has been discussed, it might kick off the idea to stop polluting ourselves as well and by then, we will have the technologies we have now, put into practice.

Thirty years from now the interconnected globe should probably be quite harmonious so far as communication is concerned which would develop, a consensus.

This consensus might just start talking about the even longer standing issues and pick up on the erosion of famine and disease. Most cancers should be curable by now and treatments exist for anything that is not.

Crops and livestock may even have moved out of the fields, through the labs and start being grown in factories and fridges but it's the consensus that will get them to those who need them the most, because food and medicine would become undeniably cheap.


Something Old

If and when that happens, there'll only be one last step to take. The same step that set us all on such a wild path in the first place and the only thing left to do will be to finish off the longest standing issue of all time.

Currency would have become useless thanks to the mighty dragon slayer of science. Subsequently, war made quite profitless, even for ideologists.

Machines should be busy with all the mining, harvesting, production and delivery providing such efficient services that they might have problems giving their products away.

Speculation on stocks would hit rock bottom and all the bankers, investors and trillionaires start wondering what to do with their time. Some would probably fight back and fight hard for a long, long time but futile it would be.

Fifty to a hundred years from now might see a cold war of science versus money and due to that innate spirit of ours the disease of currency itself become diseased, shrivel up and eventually take it's final resting place in the annals of time.


All of this is most likely hokum. I know that, you know that but that does not mean it is not one possibility. Anything is possible.

#future #hope #spirit

Ruling Power

By Roger Colins

The House of Commons in session

It's always a point of controversy to discuss war, religion, sex or politics. Controversial because these are all very much a personal point of view and disagreeing with a persons belief displays a rather callous disposition and assumes that one person, put simply, claims to know better than the other.

Of course, we don't know any better. The lot of us are crawling around blind just trying to do the best we can, the best way we know how.

A person can't really be judged a lesser being by anyone else because when it comes down to it, any one of us could be right. Dogs have their good and bad points the same as cats but which is overall 'a better pet'? We just can't be sure.

Democracy comes from the ancient Greek word demos 'of the people'. Curiously, communism has a remarkably similar definition being 'owned by the people'.

This being so, one can't help but wonder how the two found themselves in such opposition.

Communism without it's historical application is quite the excellent idea. So is democracy. National socialism works very well and monarchy, should it be genuinely benevolent, would be highly popular. It seems governance has just gotten stuck in history.


Power Play

Perhaps it has something to do with power. The adage goes that absolute power corrupts, absolute. Does it apply?

It would if you include dictatorship but not when these particular instances are designed to spread the attributes of power over a wide area.

Vladimir Putin. President of Russia

Lust for power, then. A person that finds himself in power may only want more.

The limits to their success may only depend on the limits to their morals and should this person discover that he has none, he or she could very well develop a messiah complex.

The concept of democracy differs somewhat from the rest in only one particular and that is corruption.

Any other system has a lot more holes that beg for exploitation. The lustful immoral are drawn in like moths to the flame.

Leaving consensus aside, democracy is still the most corrupt-proof government we have to work with and yet these holes keep cropping up.

Back handers, bribes, quid pro quo and back scratching constitute the epicentre for corruption, especially in a democracy. Politicians are looking for votes and will sell their mothers to appease as much of the electorate as humanly possibly.


By Design

Barack Obama. President of the United States of America

There is also the issue of funding and this is predominant across all government types.

A candidate has to publicise his entry, gain support from his party, present his policies and spread the word.

In order to do this the media is enlisted to help out and the only way to create more publicity than your opponent is to shovel the most amount of money at the media.

Does that mean the candidate willing to impart the most money will win? Certainly seems that way.

Votes are there to give the most practicable forum for opinion. Buying votes if rife in many democratic states globally but it is still down to the individual should the electorate give up his free will for a few pennies more because the practise has become established, part and parcel with how the country decides who gets to take over next.

The very existence of any government's infrastructure including anarchy, shows that there is a vested interest in how things should or should not be done. How things should be done has to lie in the hands of the people, even if it is anarchy.

Hierarchy of representatives from local council all the way up to the cabinet allows a conduit of communication from the people to the person. Representative, is a choice word.


A Civilian Servant

Politician or advocate, leader or reformist, lunatic or genius; when they stand at the front and commence parley that person represents those that gave over the responsibility. There is another name for this station.

David Cameron. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

A servant.

Should that person digress from such position to express and relay the thoughts, feelings and desires of his or her constituency, they are no longer representative of the people they claim to speak for.

Suggesting that a representative has no personal interest what-so-ever is quite at odds to the allure of power.

Finding a person that has no interest in power to serve as one's representative may seem daunting but there is a final point to be made.

If said person has a proven track record of service to his or her country then they would not refuse the honour, they could not or it would go against all that they have previously sought out and accomplished.

#power #government #ethics

Living Greats

By Roger Colins

Conan Doyle is easily one of my top ten writers of all time but I have to disagree with him on one point. Holmes once declared  how surprising it was that Watson's feeble mind stimulated his own superior, cognitive powers. I hope it was just an eccentricity of Holmes'. Surely one has to find better men to learn examples from and perhaps that was Doyle's intention as in the writer's mind, there was no better man than Holmes (asides his own brother). There are living men I can respect, those I admire and those that display unparalleled genius but none would I label 'a great'. Philosophers are generally understood to be greats but this attribute appears to be cold and impractical. Artists can quite easily be determined as greats as their work does not have to be sifted through. Within a single piece, one can see into an artists very soul and the audience can quickly decide for themselves. Scientists, inventors and pioneers aren't usually termed great as they get the genius label. Even though they may indeed be great men, it takes something else to make the bridge to something more. This is why I came to Doyle. A great seems able to bundle all of these faculties together and produce work that cannot be readily described with the usual set of adjectives. Hence, we make do with great. Such as the artist's work only ever gets sold when he's dead, it appears too the great men are only ever awarded the moniker when they take the final step beyond. There is however, one small query. In contemplating the great men of recent times, I wonder if their peers ever thought of them as great men while still alive. I confess that it is of my own opinion that although I can envisage several celebrity status personalities that are most certainly regarded as great by the general public, my own impression is far more sceptical or elitist; Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin spring to mind. Were any of them considered a great while still alive I wonder. Vincent Van Gogh is a too easy an example and public opinion really can't be accounted for. Friends and family, colleagues of the men would be able to say as much and one would hope they could give an honest account of whether or not said person was deemed great by his or her peers. I suppose we will have to wait for it to actually happen, a true great to come on scene before we will ever know. _____________________________________________________________________

greats people