A few important thoughts

OIL: Well Barrow is now in the crapper. His entire national budget is predicated on oil revenues gotten from royalties on oil at $90 per barrel and above. Today oil is at $90 and still dropping and BNE doesn't have to pay those fees. BNE saw the writing on the wall (those tankers lined up with no buyers) when oil was at $135 and did a quick agreement before the fall. Now the Belize Government is left looking like a fool. That is what happens when we put unqualified people in positions to make decisions for all of us! Now where are we going to get money to pay the national debt, education etc? This could get interesting...I see a rise in GST coming! And I bet Dean O is not sleeping well tonight.

Hurricane Lesson: With Ike hitting The US, we can take note of a lesson for our future use. The areas of Houston that never lost power had underground cables. Why don't we do this in Belize City . With underground cables, even if a cat 5 hits us, the cables are protected. All BEL would need to do would be to replace the transmission lines. This would be a far quicker and cheaper way to put Belize City back on its feet. I mentioned this to Lynn Young and he told me "it is too expensive". Fine, is that the only excuse? Well then this is easy problem.  We finance it publicly, one street per month, and while we are at it fix the street too PROPERLY..one street at a time. Eventually all would be done. And don't forget to include telephone and cable too. I don't know about you, but I would gladly authorize my tax dollars be spent on this. It is more expensive up front, but better 20 years from now. Again, good leadership with real vision would be great here.

Mercy Care: I don't want this to pass off into the night without saying a word. Mercy Care which has provided a once a day meal and free healthcare to those who really need it in the city is in such financial difficulty that they are shedding staff, shutting down the medical arm and will probably have to close all together unless someone comes to the rescue. Mercy Int'l has pulled its funding due to their own problem, GOB cannot support anymore, and donations locally have dried up. It will be sad to see them go, and we hope a miracle can be pulled off. I for one do not know what those who really need the place (not the medicine freeloaders) will do. Guess it will just be more beggars on the streets. 

Now for my educational tip of the week: It is incorrect to put two spaces after a end of sentence. This is a carry over from the old typewriter days. Current Computer programs like MS word actually put in 1.5 spaces when you use the space bar after a period, semicolon etc. So when you press the spacebar twice, you are actually getting 3 spaces.  Read your program manuals folks. It is in there! And please for god's sake stop pressing the bar twice! It is irritating. 

Incidentally, I have a few posters IM about my screen names. Yes, I post other articles elsewhere too. So here is the explanation:

Trazidex: A $100 (+GST) eye medication to help you clear optical infections. Obviously a metaphor for the blog opening all our eyes.

T.S.H.T.F. Militia: I am a member of a loose group of radicals known as the when The Shit Hits The Fan Militia. Membership is very tightly controlled :^) but has its privileges. One other blog poster on this site is a member. Can you figure out who it is?

Brains in Short Supply

Hear ye, hear ye.....what is our educational system coming to? It is so scary to me to see that we have teachers educating our youth who have not clue as to what they are teaching. I recently tried to dissect a teachers instructions on a student I tutor's homework and not only was the grammar terrible, but the directions made no sense. In the end I had to take an educated guess.

If a well educated (at least I think I am) person cannot figure out a Std 1 homework assignment then something is amiss, somewhere.

This is not letting local secondary and tertiary level educational systems off the hook either. We are graduating a bunch on idiots basically. I know. I interview them everyday with their "we was" and "I dus do it"....Oh the horror. Then I have to try to communicate to these people once they have landed themselves a cushy job elsewhere that swells the head. Why did they get that job? Well, there is no one else to hire, so employers take the best of the bad apples.

Part of the problem also lies in the fact that we even have lecturers teaching at 6th form and UB who are teaching stuff they are not qualified to teach. Accountants teaching biology and economists teaching art are but a few.

People wonder why businessmen like the "lord" seem to outsmart us at every turn. The answer lies in the fundamentals of our once vaunted educational system.

So come on everyone. Lets get some decent teachers. Let's train them properly. Let them help us turn the corner to become a first world country. But we don't want our students to be reciting jabberwocky, we want them to be independent thinkers. They should be taught to learn one new fact every day. I do, even if the last thing before I go home..

Readers are plentiful. Thinkers are rare. And from now on I will try to leave you with one common misconstrued fact per post that I will attempt to correct. 

Common Falsehood: There are three states of matter.

Truth: There are four: Solid, Liquid, Gas, and Plasma

Striving for Lower Standards

Well, I wasn't going to write anything this short week, but I just had to get a quick issue of my chest.

On Saturday, I saw a cargo truck (lic A3325) off loading garbage onto a feeder road near my house. Totally illegal, unhygienic, unsightly and just wrong.

After I stopped, I told the dumper to please stop making a mess of my community and making his garbage my problem. He politely told me "well everyone else dumps here and why do you as a PUP (too funny!) want to stop me a UDP from dumping."  My response "so if one idiot runs into a fire, then sounds like you would too. And furthermore, yes other people might dump here but today I am stopping it, and I am starting with you."

This practice of illegally dumping in our neighbor's yard, on every street corner, on every bush road, and everywhere in between has to stop. My Belizean people have no pride! They want to make their problem, someone else's problem. Simply because they are either too lazy to put out the garbage or to cheap to drive to the dump site. There also seem to be a lot of fly by night garbage people who people pay to pick up their garbage then instead of disposing of it properly, they find some side road to dump it, someone else's back yard.

Now, the UDP accuse PUP of dumping garbage. The PUP don't need to dump garbage. There are enough sickening Belizeans who are doing it on their own.

We need to stop this now. I want people to pledge to stop this madness. When you see it, stop it. Tell them to move on. We need to strive for higher standards, not lower ones.

Anyways, the rant is over. And by the way Bryan CXXd (cell # 607-4@#0), I better not see you dumping again. He told me it was either Renaissance Tower or Airport garbage, depending on which part of the conversation one believes!

I am watching.

Oh..and BTW, the Carnival incident this weekend.  You heard it here first. Remember my post about the Guiliani way of doing things. Nuff said. We have no political will to do what is necessary to ensure our basic right to safety. And the UDP claim they are all that.