Fool’s gold, or fools for gold?

Since we never really wrote a post about the Collapse movie, which you should watch (yes, I’ll never stop telling people to do so), we are going to write a post about something he mentions in it: gold.

So Mike Ruppert says that when we run out of oil we are not going to need money because it will be worth nothing, “we will be taking wheelbarrows full of money to the store just to buy a loaf of bread”, we will only need land to grow our own food, which means that we will need seeds, and gold to trade with eachother, just like the olden days. On this I agree with the seeds part, we’re definitely going to need those to survive, but gold? I’m not so sure.

In the whole existence of the human race we have traded things, some useful some not so, until the creation of  money. Just like he says in the movie about it, will it give you the nutrients you need to survive? Can you put it in the tank of the car and make it move? No. But neither does gold.

But, what’s with this fascination we humans have for it? It’s shiny and nice, yes, but it is useless. Same happens with silver, diamonds, any other kind of precious stones, or any of these modern things of vanity we have.

Sometimes I stop to think about these things (yes, it hurts a little =P) and then I observe things, like my cat, Muschi. I observe how, everytime I put my phone on the kitchen table or the laptop she just lays on it. She doesn’t care. Why? Because it isn’t something she needs. What does she (and all of we) need? Food and a place to be warm and safe.

So, why do we value it so much when it is actually so useless? Why do we and why did we so often in the past go to the extremity of killing for it (like the Kinights Templar for example)?  The human race should by now be mature enough and wise enough as a civilization to realize that vanities and thing that are not necessary, such as gold, are not essential to live a life. Why don’t we use this knowledge and wisdom we’ve obtained over the years to focus on more important things, like to give us all a complete, unified civilization. It is shown that in times of disaster, like natural disasters, etc., that we as a race CAN pull together and CAN forget about our differences and live peacefully, but why should it take something like that for this to happen?

(Thanks Jamie for helping me write this =))

The world is better because they are in it.

Hello again!

Here I am again, after ages. I know we still owe you a post about Collapse, but school is keeping me busy and Jamie also has stuff to do, so today I decided to share some very nice videos we found some time ago on Youtube. Enjoy! =)

Cats on treadmill:

Guilty dog:

Foxes on trampoline:

Kitty on trampoline:

How can someone possibly dislike such cute and lovely creatures?

Which video is your favorite? =)

The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but rather, “Can they suffer?” – Jeremy Bentham

Yesterday I was in class and a friend of mine (Area) told me that someone was giving huskies away. I told Jamie about it and he said that if my mom didn’t mind, we could have it. He’s been training dogs for years and knows how to take care of them. Besides, these lovely huskies would be put down soon unless someone adopted them. After giving it a lot of thought we decided to call, but it turned out that we could not contact the woman because calls had been restricted =(

We were already used to the idea of having a dog and we ended up looking online for people who would give them away for free, but it seems that here people just want to make money… After a while Jamie found a dog called Aspi. He is in a rescue center and we decided to contact them, and we mentioned that we have a cat. Since Aspi had never been with cats, they didn’t know how he’d react to them, and they mentioned another dog called Ron, 1 year old, medium size. I am now trying to convince my mom again.

There you have a picture of the cute thing =) He had been abandoned and he needed a blood transfusion because he was very sick about a year ago. Now he is fine and waiting for someone to give him a home. I hope that it will be us. (If you click on the picture you’ll be able to see more pictures of him).

What I like about that rescue center is that they want updates and pictures showing how the dog is getting on with living in your house, but not only that, before you get it there is a questionaire that you have to fill in so they compare it with others and see who would be more suitable for him.

The point of this post is: why do people abandon animals? Although I am going to focus on dogs.

Animals can be a nuisance. You have to feed them, wash them, take them to the vet, but you do the same with children, and sometimes even with the elderly, so if you can take care of people, why can’t you take care of dogs? I think they’re even better than people because they’ll be always be loyal to you and they will always take care of you. There is no one who would love you as much as a dog, no matter what you do to them they’ll be waiting for you with a smiling face. You can not feed them, you can abandon them, even beat them up, and they will still love you for some reason.

They do cost money, but it is possible to get an insurance for them, so if they get really sick that can pay for it. Jamie and I have been having a look at several and I remember one policy that covered you for up to 3,000 € in medical costs and up to 300,000 € in possessions damage, and it was more or less 40 €/year.

I used to think that buying animals was wrong, just like it is wrong to buy people, but I was talking to Area and she said “but what about those animals who are in the stores? They never decided that they wanted to be sold, so if everyone thought the way you do, they might be stuck there forever”. That is more or less what she said, and that point made me think about it.

Why don’t we try to change the world and make it better for all the creatures in it? Because we have been lead astray somehow. We don’t care about anything but ourselves, as long as we have not what we need anymore, but what we want, screw the rest. Animals are a part of it, and we should take care of them.

To finish with this post I’d like to share some pictures with you:

That’s Muschi. I don’t know how old she is because she started coming to our house 3 years ago and well, this is her home now =) Most of the time she ignores us, except for lunch time. We are eating and she comes to us and pokes us with those beautiful paws of hers. She doesn’t really meow, although lately Muschi has been doing it a bit more often, especially when she is hungry. I wonder why =P

And here you have Woody and Chester, Jamie’s dogs. Woody (left) is 8 and Chester (right) is 3. They both love to be stroked and love to lick! It’s impossible to escape those tongues! They are very, very nice dogs that I can’t wait to meet again =)

(Thanks darling for helping me write this)

2012

Hello everyone! Little Merry is back! =D

Sorry I haven’t been posting anything lately. I was abroad and when I came back I had exams, and although I know it is a bit late I still want to wish you all a happy 2012 =)

On December 19th my dear Jamie and I left to England, to visit his family. They live in a small town called Mattersey, in Nottinghamshire. It was LOVELY =) We visited places like Lincoln, York, Rufford, Chatsworth, Sherwood,… I really enjoyed my time there, except for when I had homework. I don’t know why they call it Christmas vacation when you have work to do =P

I’ll post some pictures in the future, because now I don’t have my hard drive here.

Hope you are doing great =) We’ll start posting again soon!

 

 

Come roll in all the riches all around you, and for once never wonder what they’re worth. – Pocahontas

On the bus on my way back home a while ago I was listening to music on my iPod. It was on random shuffle and this song started playing.

It is from one of the good old Disney movies, the kind of song that when you are little you don’t really notice what it means (at least I didn’t), but when you grow old and watch those movies again you find the meaning those words have, or, like most do, you just totally forget about it. I just think that this, and a lot of other songs, should be played to adults more often because they could really teach us something.

Here you have the Spanish version I grew up with.

Colores en el viento

Me ves ignorante y salvaje
Y conoces mil lugares
Quizás tengas razón
¿Por qué? Si es así
¿Soy salvaje para ti?
¿No puedes abrir más tu corazón?

Te crees que es tuyo todo lo que pisas
Te adueñas de la tierra que tú ves
Mas cada árbol, roca, y criatura
Tiene vida, tiene alma, es un ser

Parece que no existen más personas
Que aquéllas que son igual que tú
Si sigues las pisadas de un extraño
Verás cosas que jamás soñaste ver

¿Has oído al lobo aullarle a la luna azul?
¿O has visto a un lince sonreír?
¿Has cantado con la voz de las montañas?
¿Y colores en el viento descubrir?

Corramos por las sendas de los bosques
Probemos de los frutos su sabor
Descubre la riqueza a tu alcance
Sin pensar un instante en su valor

Los ríos y la lluvia, mis hermanos
Amigos somos todos, ya lo ves
Estamos entre todos muy unidos
En un ciclo sin final que eterno es

¿Cuán alto el árbol crecerá?
Si lo cortas hoy, nunca lo sabrás

Y no oirás al lobo aullarle a la luna azul
No importa el color de nuestra piel
Y uniremos nuestra voz con las montañas
Y colores en el viento descubrir

Si no entiendes que hay aquí
Sólo es tierra para ti
Sin colores en el viento descubrir

Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they’re in the game. – Paul Rodriguez

The other day Jamie and I were watching one of Ray Mears’ documentary: Bushcraft – Aboriginal Britain. It was very interesting because he was showing us how people lived in Britain in the Stone Age. He went to a museum, where he saw some stone tools they had there, and then he met a worker from that same museum, who showed him a veeeery old bow (around 3,000 years old). What did they do after? They decided to build their own, and let’s not forget the arrows. It was lovely until we got to part 4 and we saw a dead deer. At first I thought that he had killed it to show how effective those arrows were, but Jamie told me that that deer was shot as part of a cull (Ray Mears had explained but I missed it). It was then when I started thinking: why? Before I start ranting and whining, let’s explain what culling is. According to Merry Webster’s dictionary, culling means ”to reduce or control the size of (as a herd) by removal (as by hunting) of especially weaker animals; also: to hunt or kill (animals) as a means of population control”. But for me it means “killing animals because we think there are too many of them and that could affect us, humans”. For example, I read on The Guardian’s web page that they were doing this in Scotland because too many deer were causing road accidents. So? Well, if we followed this “logic”, then we should shoot ourselves too. Like I said in my first post, there is 10,000 times more people than there’s supposed to be. Just ignore my post, google a world population growth graph, or have a look at this one:

We went from more or less 1 billion people in the 1800s to around 6.5 billion in the first decade of the new millennium. So this is basically what’s happening to humans:

If there are too many deer, birds, seals, etc. that doesn’t mean that we can just kill most of them. That is nature. If there are supposed to be twice as many animals of a species, let them be. Nature will run its course its own way without interference by man. This might sound a bit contradictory, because after all, we are animals too, but as George Orwell said in his book Animal Farm “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.  He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals”.

Small growths in world population occurred with the discovery of steam power in the 1800s, but I still think that things were OK back then. I think that what made the situation worse was the fact that we discovered how to better process the oil of the world. I was supposed to work with Jamie on a post about the Collapse documentary wherein Michael Ruppert talks about oil and what was caused because of it, but that is going to be our next post. What I mean by this is that through the discovery of oil the population has grown alarmingly in the past two centuries, and we have done a lot of harm in such a short period of time. Yet we think that we will help the planet if we cull a few deer.

I’m not saying that I’m totally against hunting as a means of survival, or a means of obtaining food, because like I said before, we are animals, and like Mufasa said in The Lion King, that’s the circle of life, but as a “sport” it’s a different thing all together, and that is what I think in a sense culling is, a sport.

Nature does its own culling.

(Special thanks to Jamie for helping me write this)

Humanity puts vanity before kindness to animals.- Colin Beavan

In this post I am going to mention something terrible that happened on September 23rd.

That day my boyfriend (Jamie) arrived from León to visit me for a week. We had dinner and then we left to go to the city center. This was around 12 at night. Yes, very nice… However, on our way there, whilst I was driving we saw a dead cat in the road. Somebody had killed the animal and hadn’t even bothered to move the poor thing to the side. Then we saw a fox take him away. I couldn’t help it and I started to cry. I cried because people do NOT care.

A few minutes later I ran over one. It came out of nowhere. I couldn’t stop in time to avoid hitting the poor thing. I immediately started to cry again. I didn’t know what to do. We got out of the car to see if we could do something for it. It was on the floor in the middle of the road. So were we, and cars were honking the horn at us, probably wondering “Why are you looking at a dead cat? Get out of there before you end up like it”. I was looking at the cat, trying to think who to call, and it was looking back at me, not able to move. I don’t know if it was hate what I saw in its eyes or a cry for help.

I was too scared and I didn’t know how to react. However, Jamie, who by the way is allergic to cats, took it and moved it to one side of the road, but it was too late. It wasn’t breathing anymore. He decided to put it on the grass. There was nothing else we could do.

The worst thing was that on our way back to the car I saw a man outside of his house, and whilst crying I asked him if he had a cat. He said “No”. Then I explained, “It’s because I ran over one and it’s dead”. “Don’t worry,” he said, “ that happens to all of us”.

So, you run over a cat or a dog, and it doesn’t matter, but if you run over a person you have to call an ambulance, the police, and god knows who else. Why? If people leave animals to their luck, why shouldn’t we leave people to their luck too? (Although some already do that). This doesn’t mean that I would do it, of course not. If we damage something we have to fix it. I am not God (if there is one), therefore I have no right to determine the fate of anything, whether it is a person or an animal, and neither have you.

Why are we so “important”? Why aren’t animals? Because they cannot talk? Because they can’t produce money? Well, let me tell you that we are not as civilized and not as caring although we may believe we are. We will be when we consider wildlife as important as ourselves.

We are animals too however, but it seems that we have developed into a species that destroys that which does NOT belong to us: the Earth and the creatures living on it. We use animals to test new products, probably because we think we haven’t developed far enough. We have created enough brands of make up, wonderful different types of shampoo, why make more? We are in the 21st century, we can create synthetic materials, why do we have to slay animals or torture them through testing just so we can have a “nice” fur coat or a shiny red lipstick? Why do we have to pollute rivers, soil, air, etc. just to create more junk? Junk that we probably don’t need and that we just created to make our lives comfortable, and now have become too accustomed to. And it is not just animals or nature, we are also harming ourselves.

Anyway… I totally understand that when you take an animal to the vet it costs money, and that most times people can’t afford surgery or any kind of special treatment when their pet needs it, so they put them down. Why don’t we change that? I am no expert on any topic. I might know a little bit about something and nothing about something else, but I do have ideas. So those of you who are experts on this topic, why don’t you gather and try to solve this kind of problem?

I only have one thing left to say:
Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man.

(Thanks Jamie for helping me write this)

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed” – Gandhi

Let’s start blogging.

I am going to start talking about something I find important: the environment. Note that I am a student of translation, not chemistry, biology or whatever you have to study to become an expert on the topic. I am also not very good at explaining myself, especially in a foreign language, so bare with me =) I chose this topic because I had to do a presentation not long ago, which means that I had been working on it for a little while. It’s not that I am going to give you lots and lots of figures and data, but just some things you should know, or remember.

Wherever you go there is always somebody telling you that we have to take care of the planet. I am one of them, and although I am not the best ecologist in this world, I am working on it. Some people say that global warming does not exist. Are you serious? Do you really think that scientists are saying that just because? Do you really think that they are wasting their time researching just because? I don’t think so. If you say that it does not exist, it’s like if you came to me and told me “cancer and aids do not exist”.

While preparing the speech I learnt a few things, i.e. if it wasn’t for agriculture and medicines, there would only be 500,000 people in the world. Incredible, isn’t it? Well, we are 10,000 times more people than we were some decades ago, and the more, not the merrier. We are too many and the planet has only a certain amount of resources. What should we do? We have two options: we can either start killing people or stop bringing children into the world, and I am sure that the first one is not the right one, not for me at least. There are lots of kids out there who need parents, why can’t you be the mom of a little boy? Or the dad of a little girl? The problem with adoption is all the money it costs and all the time you waste. That is something that has to change somehow, because I will never understand why people have to pay thousands of euros to be able to have a kid, thousands that could be used to buy him or her food and clothes, amongst others.

And it’s not enough that there are too many people, nope. We have to damage even more. We always have to make stuff from raw materials, because recycling “isn’t cool”. A piece of recycled paper doesn’t look as awesome as a new one. Instead of using lots of plastic bags, we could go to the supermarket with ecological ones, those that are made from fabric or something alike, because plastic is not biodegradable, and batteries, oh batteries… those little things that have the devil inside of them: mercury, zinc, etc. which are highly pollutant.

Talking about highly pollutant substances: did you know that a little drop of oil pollutes thousands of liters of water? Don’t even dare put it down the sink, the toilet or wherever it can get to more water. Put it in a bottle, and once it’s full, dispose of it in the right container. I have to admit that I don’t know what they do with it, maybe the garbage people don’t recycle it at all, or maybe they do, but at least do your bit.

We could also get water saving devices, and buy ecological bulbs, etc. The problem is that all these things to help the planet are more expensive than regular, pollutant ones. If we put pressure on whoever we have to, companies, the government, I don’t know, I am sure that we could turn ecology into a business. Which would be good, or not.  But at least they’d start to compete, to compete for the best ecological devices, and after a while, that’d be the only thing we could find, I guess, and that would make all of us buy those kinds of things, such as cars.

I don’t think I have to talk about more things, I am sure you know what you should do. For some reason people only live in the present. Don’t you realize that there is a future? And it will not be very pleasant unless we all put some effort in and try to deal with problems which are not impossible to solve.