As IF Times

link:  https://thepostmillennial.com/canadian-cops-advise-car-owners-to-leave-keys-at-their-front-door-so-thieves-can-steal-without-confrontation?utm_campaign=64530

Deserved or not, populations of different countries have reputations that are generally accepted as being true. Scots are dour, the French are snooty, Americans are simple and the Germans are orderly.  Canadians have historically been renowned for an admirable trait; they’re known as being tolerant and nice.

With immigration and travel, populations lose some of their traditional characteristics and stereotypes are harder to maintain.

As existing native populations are proportionally reduced and as old traditions and values get watered down, a certain homogeneity appears across all nations.

One such universal aspect of a watered down culture is crime.  No one can claim that any society is without its share of criminal activity of course, but no one can deny the growing level of crime in all western nations.  Were this not the case, budgets for policing would be falling, whereas just the opposite is true. According to statistica.com, in American cities, 65 of the 300 largest cities in America spend 40 percent of their general budgets on policing.  I won’t go into discussion of how to parse the statistics, that’s fodder for party conversations.

What is interesting is the uniquely Canadian solution to some criminal activity recently proposed by the Toronto police department.  In response to the relentless crime wave of stolen cars, many of which were stolen by taking the keys right from people’s homes, the brave constabulary have proposed placing car keys right at the front door of the house to make it easier for the thieves. He may have also advised placing some cookies at the door, but we don’t know.  Clearly, this preserves the reputation of niceness on the part of Canadians.

To be fair, the police may have borrowed the idea from the strategy used in New York city in the eighties when cars were left unlocked with a sign on the window stating “no radio”. The idea is the same: crime is going to happen anyway; why make it difficult? While some may think there’s an elegant logic to this way of thinking, it leads us down a road to an undeniable conclusion:  Why have any police at all?  As a matter of fact, if you keep pulling on that thread of logic, why have any justice apparatus including judges and especially lawyers?  If you’re in the locksmith business, you may want to learn to code.

As we have seen in major urban cities, theft, often brazen daylight theft by gangs of ‘youts’ are commonplace, especially in the US.  Employees are instructed not to impede the thieves and thus they ransack retail stores with fearless abandon. Any day can be black Friday at the Nike store or the nearest Best Buy or CVS. Actually, it’s better than Black Friday, because you don’t even have to be inconvenienced by paying.

Responses to this have varied from enclosing display cases with plastic or mesh to just closing down retail stores altogether. Flagship stores of big retail chains have completely closed down in cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago.

As in Canada, the logic behind the acceptance of a bit of petty crime here and there is so that the citizens can be ‘safe’.  The mayor of Britain’s London, Sadiq Khan, has stated that violent crime is just something to accept when living in a big city; but without explaining Tokyo or Shanghai.  We hear this word invoked a lot these days as a pretext of not doing anything or to follow policies so inane as to be idiotic.  As we’ve seen from the very recent Covid debacle, being safe meant policies that were enacted even if they harmed or even killed you.

The idea of a safe society has been severely perverted from its original intent. It’s not supposed to be safe for those who make others unsafe. This is almost the entire point of paying for a police force and a justice apparatus.  However, if nations such as Canada determine that they don’t want their citizens to inconvenience criminal behaviour, they should at least change the semantics.  Let’s just call them faux pas.  If by chance, these perps are caught in the act, the ‘police’ can take them aside, wag a finger and tsk tsk them.  Perhaps some will require a scolding.  In the most extreme cases, a strongly worded letter would be sent to their address.

This can free up a lot of manpower and resources for other more serious breaches of society’s rules;  such as posting rude comments on-line.

link:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/01/11/bill-gates-backed-climate-solution-gains-traction-but-concerns-linger/?sh=34f89544793b

A few generations ago, a television comedy show was produced entitled The Beverly Hillbillies. The show centered on the lives of a hillbilly family who had struck it rich following an oil discovery and were convinced to move to Beverly Hills.

Only in hindsight do we realize just how original and funny those old sitcoms were.  In one of the episodes, Jed Clampett, the patriarch, wanted to enact a plan to clear away the constant smog that settled around Los Angeles (even at that time).  He proposed to his banker, Milburn Drysdale, that some enormous fans be erected on the hills to blow all the smog away.  Here was a guy who wanted to use his new found wealth to do good for others and he had a simple, if wacky idea to do so.

I’m reminded of this episode because of revelations that Bill Gates, he of erstwhile Microsoft wealth and now a world expert on vaccines, will finance what amounts to be a big sunshade to block out the sun’s harmful rays, because, you know, global warming. While I am of the view that you can’t accomplish great things without taking big chances, many of Gate’s adventures post Microsoft are eccentric at best, crazed at worst.  In the case of the mythical Jed Clampett or the real life magnate Andrew Carnegie, a billionaire before it became trendy, their efforts to improve the condition of mankind didn’t involve harming others…and they did it with their own money.

Bill Gate’s record has not been so benign.  The Microsoft loot allowed him to create the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which ostensibly funds humanitarian issues. The influence of his pool of money is multiplied many times over by roping naïve governments to also throw in their tax dollars to really juice up a venture.  While his intentions are admirable, the actual effects of his initiatives, notably vaccine implementations have resulted in unforeseen setbacks not reported in the mainstream news.  Despite this, governments worldwide still consider Gates an authority on vaccine implementation as observed by 2 years of Covid disarray.

Another quixotic venture is the funding of an experiment to try to block out the sun’s harmful rays.  This sounds like another one of those “well it seemed like a good idea at the time” things which will likely lead to a multitude of unforeseen harmful effects; you don’t need to be a college dropout to figure that out.  In this case the ripple effects will create havoc for hundreds of millions of innocent citizens just minding their own business.

When regular people think of some great hare brained scheme, most will die from underfunding and the progenitors labeled nuts.  When people like Gates have an idea, his money will buy the ears of people with infinite money, ie governments, who will then pronounce him a visionary as if he was Leonardo Da Vinci.   Sort of like the novel, 50 Shades Of Grey; the only reason the man in the novel is attractive is because he’s wealthy… otherwise he would just be a run of the mill sexual predator.

Of course Gates is not alone in foisting his vision upon others. For some reason, when people pass a threshold of unimaginable wealth, their inner Doctor Evil percolates to the surface and they expect to move mankind around like pieces on a chessboard.  Suddenly they are convinced that they have a vision beyond that which the average person can comprehend.  Unlike despots in the past who depended on military might to impose their vision of the world, modern oligarchs use stock options.   Invariably there’s always a financial bonanza to be had by being on the right side of any large scale government program.  Just ask Al Gore. Instead of being threatened by death as in the old world, people are now encouraged to fall in line by something worse; the fear of relative poverty by not participating.

As for useful ideas, why not create means by which you can tow icebergs to the desert to create more arable land? Why not build land bridges to link all the continents? Why not shoot all waste into space? Lots of room out there; and if not doable, let’s just dump it on the moon. Give me a call Bill, I’ve got a ton of great ideas.