‘Come on boy, it’s not gonna hurt ya’, quipped the old man.
‘It’s disgusting Dad, and it stinks, it’s still warm’, I retorted, as I removed a Bennett’s wallabies end trails.
‘Stop piss farting around boy before you bust the piss sack’, my old man had said one fine evening while cleaning our nights hunt!
I could have thought of a million other thing’s I would have rather have been doing, that I probably would not have done anyway, but I always got dragged along hunting for meat to feed our ferrets. Learning how to live and survive when or if society and the gift of societal privileges ever deserted us, while learning the importance of dealing with what is mine and everything that comes with those responsibilities. Or just maybe, we ruin everything good and proper for ourselves and have to revert back to how we once lived!
If shit ever hit the fan when it comes to living the way we do, at least I would have the skills to survive.
…
I wonder whether or not this corona virus is just mother nature giving us the good news for continually and ruthlessly ruining this great place we call home. Earth is the more common name we refer to as our home, and for the most part, all we do is f@#k the place up and most other good things we have in this world.
Pretty well every single creature on this planet, flora or fauna, takes something from its surrounds, and in return, gives something back. All of it, every single organism on this planet takes something and then gives something back, except for one creature. This creature, or mammal, this evolved ape, just continually finds a way to rape and pillage the living daylights out of anything good for their own purpose, profit, peddle stool, comfy couch or Facebook page, and that creature is us, human beings!
Yet the saddest thing in all our destructive, hurt feeling ways, we are truly the only creature that can actually enhance our planet and we are generally oblivious to the damage we do, even while we do things that help others. We can fly to the moon and send probes a gazillion miles away! We grow our communities by opening up businesses, giving jobs to people, those people do a job to get paid, while making the owners a profit! It is a pretty simple process, I work, you pay,. We all make money to buy houses, feed our kids, accumulate a retirement fund, etc etc. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This happens all over the world and for the most part, it works really well. Yet as some employers don’t like to pay their staff properly, while some employee’s like to sabotage work places because they didn’t get their own way. This is the same principal that compels most human being’s to completely disregard the world’s complex ecosystem, as we need to make money and we are to lazy and special to put our rubbish in a bin or clean up after ourselves.
I’ll give you a few examples before you bail on me for thinking I’m having a pointless rant. We all play a role in ruining things for ourselves and the planet, and for the most part, our hearts are in the right place, as we think were doing good things all the time.
Let’s say your a greenie that drives out to the Tarkine rain forest for a protest, in your old Datson 180b, that’s blasting CO2 emissions strait into the atmosphere. All the while your carrying your lunch in a plastic snack box or plastic bags, that will get slipped strait back into landfill somewhere, at some point in time, when your done with them. While old mate tree feeler is back on government payments once you’ve shut down the forest industry.
There was recently a poor dude in America that was murdered by someone in a position of power, all caught on camera. Then collectively, this whole country and their community’s, the actual good folk, went and rightfully started protesting! Yet the stains of their society took this as an opportunity to riot, vandal and steal, all under the cover of an entire race of human being’s and their want to be treated as human being’s. These kind of people are everywhere, hiding in the cracks, waiting for something good to happen so they take advantage for their own purposes, whatever they may be.
I’m as biased as the rest of you, so I find it hard to admit to anything I ruin while trying to do a good thing. But I’ll go with how I once fucked things up for some people by not wanting to cook fine dining food in a country pub. I wanted to get paid and cook pub grub. I copped it from friends, colleagues and family when I decided to walk away after my partner had gotten sick of me bringing home the stress associated with trying to pull of great expectation’s with no resources. There must have been some merit to it, yet I’m still struggling to grip their perspective, as my should have the right to improve my life, not ruin it, like everyone else.
Or you could like most of us, or pretty well all of us, that complain about all sorts of garbage on social media, when someone has a different opinion or post’s something that hurts out feeling’s. And I would bet my left kidney, that 90% of those people complaining, wouldn’t even walk out onto their own nature strip or local park to clean up a bit of rubbish that someone else left there. The same people that can bring a waitress to tears for getting a drink order wrong, or name and shame a business on Trip adviser for making a simple human error. I guarantee nearly all these people that get in a big hissy fit over minuscule life challenges or opinions, would rather throw their half eaten sandwich in to a bin, than give it to someone who’s fresh outta luck and support and living under a bridge.
I could pull out examples all day, but I’m sure you get the direction of my quarrel here. We are all pretty special when someone makes a mistake or hurts our feelings, yet very few human beings ever put the phone down to do something good for the world anymore, without payment or recognition or giving someone else a hard time about it.
Now not since world war 2 has the world seen anything like the Corona Virus. We have whole countries being told to stay in their homes, the world wide stock market is crippled, while the cities of probably the biggest super power in the world, The USA, are starting to burn.
But lets look at some good things to come from the human race being told they need to stay home. You can see mount Everest at the moment for the first time in fifty years from Mumbai, the haze cloud that had engulfed the Eiffel tower in Paris for 40 odd years has subsided, both due to the reduction in carbon dioxide and other pollutants we pump into the atmosphere while going about our normal day to day lives, making money and sponsoring impoverished children in Africa. Most cities across the globe, from Europe, China, the middle east etc. are recording a 50% drop in pollutants right now, as opposed to this time last year. So finally, the world is getting cleaner, Mother nature is taking a breath, all because some dude in a slaughter house ate a dodgy bat, therefore we have all had to stay home. We’re all righteously pissed off and bored about that at the moment, as how dare we not be able to go out and have fun and not keep ruining things. Yet in retrospect of global warming and leaving a livable place for our kids and grand kids to live in, this is nearly the best thing anyone could have done. Nobody did anything intentionally, some dude just ate a bat from the flea infested, bacterial haven that we call the Wuhan market. This kind of pandemic has been happening at least every hundred years or so since big Gengas Kahn followed the silk road all the way to the western tips of the middle East in 13th century. That was called the Black Plague, which was a different disease entirely, as it was contracted from rats, yet it came from the same parts of the world!
I’m definitely not saying the Chinese have done anything intentionally, yet a fair few world wide pandemics have originated from China, or more specifically, the stank markets from that part of the world.
While from a food safe perspective and keeping your shit clean outlook, their standards appear to be very much in line with what NOT to do when it comes to food hygiene. If you haven’t seen what I’m talking about, check out these few links which should bring you up to speed.
The first link here is from the Philippines, while the second one is from China. Now I’m not running these guys down for making a dollar, as feeding your family means under taking things some people wouldn’t be proud of. Plus I am a chef, so there is not much when it comes to eating I wouldn’t chew on at least once. Yet I am having a dig at the standards of which this stuff is processed, stored and consumed!
The third video is from the apparent source of the ‘Corona Virus’.
Being a trade qualified chef who has done nearly as many OHS, HACAP, food hygiene courses and modules that I have had Sunday dinners, it is no wonder something like this has happened, again, and it will continue to happen while these sort of food hygiene standards are allowed to continue, albeit the lack of food standards.
#colorcoded
When you’ve got well over a billion people, coupled with a communist government, which enforces strictly segregated social classes, then of course your going to get your middle and lower classes doing whatever it takes to get a feed and make a dollar to pay the bills. The ‘eating of dogs’ I’m not a fan of, but we cant single China out for such practices, as cannibals pop up every now and again in western countries. You can not stop social stains, all you can do is try and limit their impact.
One of the first things your taught as a chef is that if you preparing high level perishables (beef, seafood, chicken etc.), you use color coded boards and you change your board for the required preparation. In Australia, we use a Red board for red meat, blue board’s for seafood, green boards for vegetables, etc, etc. Only when a chef gets complacent with hygiene standards, that we all know and trained for, then people start getting sick, BIG TIME. In one of these YouTube videos, or all of them even. You can see clear as day, these guys have all sorts of animals, spread out all over the place being slaughtered on the spot, marinated and freshly smoked. All the while being killed, cleaned, packed and sent home for Mum to dish up to the brood when Dad gets home from a hard day at the grind. “Would you like the ‘smoked rat’ Karen, or would you like one of these ‘freshly smoked fruit bats Gary knocked out yesterday, he cleaned it on the same board they were gutting pythons on, extra flavor eh?”.
I’ve have always wanted to travel and eat in some of these places, especially a place like the Tomohon market, yet knowing what I know now in regards to food hygiene and how to get food poisoning, I don’t think I ever will, or not at least until places like that implement some food hygiene practices that are on point with the rest of the world. The world is always going to have black markets of some description, on every level of every trade and market known to man, that’s just the way things are with human kind(the stains again). But having open slaughter houses with nearly every creature under the sun being held, killed, cleaned, prepared and sold, with what appears to be no hygiene standards and minimal cleaning apparatus being made available, nothing is going to change. This is honestly stupidity of the highest caliber! ‘Russian roulette anyone?’.
Although Wuhan (apparent Covid 19 source city) does have a fairly high end laboratory testing community for these sort of virus’s, so does nearly every developed country in the world. But to assume these guys dropped this kind of virus on the world is nearly as stupid as eating anything from these markets. There’s no way known a regime would drop a biological weapon on the their own populous. China might be a bit different in their communist ways, but they are far from being a stupid country!
Keeping things clean, from yourself, to your local park, to the local creek (where you could once upon a time catch tadpoles), to your train or bus station, commercial kitchens, and especially a food market in a city that is bustling with over or around 3 million people, would be a great way to start preventing this kind of thing from happening again.
So as outrageous as it sounds, what if the human race, me and you included, and everyone you know, actually came up with a plan to clean our planet up! That’s right, turn off Tiger King and close your Facebook page for the day, go down to your local park, bus station or creak, and clean up a bit. The boys and I used to catch tadpoles when we were kids, and I’m fairly certain there are not many around these days for me and my son to catch as we have poisoned all the creeks, while washing our cars and bleaching our whites.
As most of us don’t like getting a skerrick of dirt under our finger nails, we could take a leaf out of the primary school grounds man I had in primary school, Mr Dent. Mr Dent used to walk around with a stick that all us kids thought was magic, until we knew what was going on. He would touch any piece of rubbish with this stick and it would magically stick to it, which he would then drop into his hessian bag or bin. He would walk around the school grounds over lunch and recess time, cleaning up after all the lazy kids who would off load their rubbish onto his well kept school grounds, with his magician like stick, griping the rubbish and taking it away. If us kids carried on like toe rags or got caught littering, you generally got punished by having to pick the rubbish up ourselves. Mr Dent’s stick was not magical though, he had a nail protruding through the end of it, which would obviously stab the rubbish, allowing him to pick it up without getting extra bile on himself that we all used to leave for him. Importantly though, in the day and age of everyone being scared of a bit of dirt on their hands, while dumping their waste into our local creeks, and complaining about how f@#ked everything is, Mr Dents magic stick could help encourage people to go out and clean up, I would personally love a Mr Dent stick. It would be like joining a sort of Jedi night group(captain planet anyone). Even all the girls used to chase Mr Dent around, trying to sneak up on him. When the girls got close, he would turn around and go ‘Boo’ and scare them away. This man new more about life than keeping thing’s clean, he knew how to impress the girls.
All this sounds great in theory, going out and cleaning our planet up, but we do have this civil liberty thing that is basically ‘who are you to tell me what I’m gonna with my time?’ I can envision your thoughts right now “who is this mad f@#k, like I’m going to clean up someone else’s shit!”
I’m no scholar or academic, not yet anyway, but I don’t really see any other way were going to clean our planet up. While I’m fairly certain rats, mice and locusts didn’t build that rubbish island out in the middle of the pacific ocean. That was us, the human race.
No matter what anyone want’s to think about how the world works, nobody will do anything without getting paid or gaining some kind of recognition. It is just the way it is, for the most part anyway, as that’s what drives us, reward for effort. So…..
We could set up recycling systems like the Germans have, and actually start cleaning up and properly recycling our shit! We could get the dole check guys or job seekers onto cleaning up the parks and other human race dumping grounds. Give them ‘Mr Dent sticks’ so they don’t have to worry about getting their fingers dirty, while waiting for a job. We could also convince local counsels to trade collected waste for parking vouchers or something similar to encourage us working folk to get out and clean up when we have finished watching Tiger King. Singapore is one of the cleanest cities in the world, as they get their unemployed and homeless to clean the place, in return for civil liberties. things like food and shelter, that the majority of us Westerners have and continue to take for granted, like building rubbish islands and killing all the frogs and tadpoles. It would be hard work to set up, but not impossible.
‘Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world Chess Championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.’ — Richard Dawkins
I love the greenies, as I am a natures boy with the best of them. Yet it would be more practical for our ‘save the forest’ friends to get together and create more biodegradable ways to store food and travel when they decide to travel out and save the rain forest. Helping the logger’s find a job would be pretty good as well, as I am certain most of the loggers have kids to feed.
Protesters need to find a way of being herd without our social stains using these kind of movements as a means to riot, steel and vandalize. Their president has just threatened to deploy the army if they don’t go home. Cities are burning, once again. While this racist shit in the 21st century need to be eradicated! An example need’s to be set for those that abuse their power like those policemen did. Sadly though, similar things happen in all forms of life. The fight will continue though.
And importantly from my own endeavors, there was nothing really wrong with not wanting to cook fine dining food without the proper resources, let alone the drive to do it anyway. But hang on James, I’m missing the point here, I should be coming up with examples of ruining things for others while trying to do a good thing for myself??? I had better go with how my sisters used to cut sick at me for pissing in the toilet and waking them up when we were kids. ‘stop making so much noise James, piss on the side’ they used used to say. I was only trying to get it in the bowl, but when I aimed at the side, sometimes it would go on the floor, then I would cop it anyway? But shit, wait on, I’m doing it again. I’m must be biased. Someone I know needs to troll me with something legitimate here, I’m on struggle street with thinking of how I ruin things for others, while doing good things for myself!
Most importantly though, us Australian’s really do need our Chinese neighbors. As usual, someone does something wrong, or not really even something wrong, a virus just originated in a market, from some dude that ate a bat, and all of a sudden, people are calling for Chinese blood and wanting to boycott the whole country of China! This communist regime stimulates one third, or over 30 per cent, of our entire economy. These guys help farmers buy houses, they fill our shops, they fill our universities. Without a big trader like China, our economy and this great country us lucky ones call home, will suffer. From every level of every aspect of our great way of life. We need to keep under control their potential monopolizing of land and companies, as any country or person does, but we are the ones that have become reliant on them, while continually selling our land to them. I wonder how many people who have called to boycott China, have now turned around and said ‘justice for Floyd Banks’. They are two completely different situations entirely, yet there is a big correlation evident there, but I’ll leave that one for you to figure out!
…
‘My fingers stink Dad, I don’t like shooting’. I pestered to my father on the trip home that night.
‘So you want to get rid of the ferrets then boy’, replied my father.
‘no Dad, whats that got to do with anything’
‘they are your pets son, if you do not want to feed them, clean up after them, do all the work and claim all the responsibility that comes with having a pet, then you can not have a pet. The same goes for anything in life. If you want something, you need to own every aspect that comes with that’, replied my father.
‘I love the ferrets though Dad, I just hate the smell and I busted the piss sack all over my trousers again’ was my reply.
‘you need to slow down son, sharpen your knife a bit more, and nobody in this world is going to clean up your shit and look after you when you grow up. That’s on you boy’.
Taking responsibility, cleaning our shit own shit up and starting to look at how to prevent problems, instead of cutting the head off whoever may or may not have started it is how we can get our planet clean and back on track. We protect and carry the handicapped, we produce all sorts of medicines to cure disease and treat impurities, we even send people to the moon. We sure as f@#k can help prevent viruses by cleaning our shit up. If only we were not so precious and started to collectively do something about it!
#stay tuned for my next article on the Lizard aliens that secretly run the worlds administrations, coming soon.
