Global warming, the new WMD

With all the sceptics about global warming something has ocurred to me to begin a new conspiracy theory.

What about if some governments are not really interested on fighting global warming because it is actually a passive weapon of mass destruction. You can not blame me! It is everybody's fault!

It is appealing. If I know that the consequences of global warming will not affect me too much, but it will wipe out my enemies, why bother on fighting it. Talk about acceptable losses and collateral damage.

It reminds me about the eighties and the fear of nuclear war. The threat was very real and scary, what if we find something less real, something that can be denied or very difficult to prove, but which consequences can not be stopped if every body is not envolved in fighting the problem.

Well, I do not actually believe in conspiracy theories.

What I really believe is in human stupidity and greed. Why bother about a problem that will affect to people that will live fifty years from now, I will be dead and it will be their problem. Yeah! it is every body's fault!

I am not an ecologist, In fact I hate ecologist, they are too fanatic and narrow minded for my taste. But, if the problem is real why do not do something about it?

Do not expect the politicians to do something, do not believe them, do it yourself, change your politicians, change your habits, change the world.

Goodbye cluster bombs, almost

It seems that finally an agreement for a treaty to ban cluster bombs has been reached and at least one hundred countries are going to sign it. This treaty adds to the arms trade treaty and the mine ban treaty.

This three treaties are one the most successful things that the movements and organizations against armament and illegal trade of arms have achieved. Obviously this arrive late for the millions of people that have died or will die in the future because some heartless want to make money from the suffering of the innocents.

The bad thing about these treaties are that the countries that produce most of the armament that they ban have no intention to sign.

The USA, Russia, Israel, China, Pakistan and India among others are the countries that produce most of the cluster bombs that are fired in actual conflicts and they are not going to sign the treaty. They make and sell this weapons despite knowing that most of the victims that this kind of bombs produce are civilians.

A cluster bomb is a bomb that is formed by hundreds of smaller bombs that are spread in an area. This kind of bomb does not discriminate the target and are often used to attack cities as in the Lebanon War of 2006 by the Israeli Army or the invasion of Basora by the British army.

A proportion of the munition of this bombs does not explode when it is dropped, so they are a permanent danger to the people in the area where they are used. Often children pick up the bombs and die in the blast.

Is it more important to make money than protect life? For some people the answer is yes. They deserve a special place in hell.

Somalian Pirates, who is to blame?

There is usually two sides to a story, this is the case of the Somalian pirates.

The only thing that makes the news about this country are the acts of piracy. The last two weeks the number of ships taken by pirates has increased exponentially. The quantities asked as ransom are in the millions of dollars. The last ship taken is a tank ship with oil worth 100 million dollars.

This ships are usually boarded on international waters or in waters of countries that can not fight this actions, so different national and international authorities are taking measures to protect the ships that travel this area. This week one of this pirate ships has been sunk by the Indian navy. NATO ships are also patrolling this waters to discourage more pirate attacks.

As usual the only response that international community has is to take military actions.

Somalia is a forgotten country that obtained its independence from Britain and Italy in 1960. The country has been involved in different civil wars almost since 1970 and has not been an stable state authority since then.

This means that the country has none of the minimum services that population needs to live a decent life. No education, no sanitation, no healthcare, no water supply, no justice system, no police, nothing.

Recurrent droughts and recent floods has destroyed almost all the means of surviving of the populations, no agriculture, no cattle, no commerce, nothing.

Most of the pirates were fishermen that have lost their mean of surviving. No state authority means no protection of jurisdictional waters. Most of the areas where Somalian fishermen used to work are now used by fishermen from other countries. It is interesting a story that has just appeared on BBC news explaining this situation. The story adds some other points that I did not knew, like the illegal dumping of wastes on Somalian waters. It is not enough to stole their resources, we have to poison their waters too.

Developed countries have done nothing about Somalian problems, its a poor country with no resources, so the people of this country are no priority, they do not exist.

It is absolute hypocrisy to use military actions against people that has been driven to piracy by desperation. It is morally regrettable to waste resources in military actions that could be used to help Somalian people.

Maybe International courts that can judge acts against humanity should raise a criminal case against developed countries for genocide by omission in the case of Somalian people.

Why spanish movies are so bad?

Year after year the films made in Spain attract less and less people to the movie theaters.

The public has not much consideration for the spanish movie makers and almost all the movies shown each year make less money that they cost. We are talking about movies that have a production cost between two and five millions euros (you have to add to this the promotion costs) that sell at the most half a millon euros in tickets.

The only exception to this are movies that barely can be considered as spanish, with foreign directors and almost all foreign cast. They are considered spanish movies just because some part of the money come from spanish producers.

So, where is the problem?

Usually the story of the many spanish movies is just plain stupid and are made for people that like this kind of movies. Other movies tell a story that does not interest people anymore, like the ubiquotous spanish civil war, or try to exploit some polemic issue that only interest to the writer of the script and the director of the movie.

The quality of the actors are no better, usually the movies use actors that have some notoriety because they appear in some tv series. There are other actors that are plain bad, but there are famous for some strange reason. I have always though that in spain there are no more professionals in the actor business, they are just glorified amateurs that appear as quickly as they disapear.

Movie theater tickets are also expensive, you have to pay around 7 euros and there are better ways to spent that money when the probability to feel robbed after seen the movie is very high. You always can see the movie in tv one or two years later for free, there is no rush.

But the problem is not the prize of the tickets, the problem is that money from our taxes are going to the producers of those movies. So we are robbed twice each time that we decide to see a spanish movie.

Maybe is time to think again about to try to save spanish cinema, in this times of crisis there are another priorities. You can not save something nobody cares about.

They need them too

The last two years has appeared recurrently in the news a story about how many engineers need Europe to maintain the economical growth and the need of the industry.

The last couple of months the story has changed to how many qualified immigrants we need to fill all the jobs that will create Europe in the next years. The number is about one hundred thousand people.

There are some problems that our governments are ignoring.

The first one is that the countries where this people will be coming from need them more than we do. It is stupid to fund programs to help developing countries when we are taking their human capital. There are no development without qualified people (doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, ...). All the money that we can give can not replace them. To take away this people will kill the economies of these countries.

The second problem is why we do not have as many qualified people as we need. In Spain during the last ten years the people that goes to the university to obtain a degree has descended abruptly. This is very evident in the engineering schools.

There are many reasons for that, one of them are the level of the compulsory education in our country. The last PISA report gives to our country one of the worst evaluations of the last years. The lower the level, the more difficult to the students to obtain a degree. More and more students abandon their studies after the first year of their degree because of lack of an adequate level of preparation.

The other reason are the salaries of the people with a degree and the perception that having a degree is not a guarantee to have a good job. Statistics say other thing, the salary of people with a degree double the salaries of non qualified workers and unemployment is lower.

But people not live by the statistics, only the perception that the effort of five or more years of hard work does not pay enough lead to people to other career choices.

Where is the solution? In my opinion, if you want engineers, you have to prepare the people that you need from the beginning. Putting more money into the first levels of education is a good start.

Evidently, our industry has to change too, they have to appreciate more the education that people receive and try to use them to innovate and create new opportunities. We need that because obviously we do not want that our people have to go to more developed countries to find a job adequate to their capabilities. And this is just the problem that we have started with :-)

Banking fees, the house always wins

Just like every year the banks inform to their clients of the increase of their fees for every service they provide. Usually there are some differences among the banks, but there is something that is always the same, the increases are outrageous.

For a bank high inflation rates only means that they have to charge more to their clients to gain more money. So, it is not unusual that the fees charged for example for having a credit card or just for having a savings account, raises a ten or a twenty percent from one year to another.

The funny thing is that the yearly benefits of most of the spanish banks are sky high. Just this week the result reports of some of the biggest banks informed of record benefits.

So, I need some explanation about how it is possible that the government needs to loan hundreds of millions of euros of our money to these banks when they are making a lot of money just by having our savings. So, none of the risks and all of the benefits.

The central bank of each country regulates the maximum amount of the fees that all banks can charge to their clients. The main problem is that this maximum is too high. If we are risking our money to protect their business it is time to have something in return. Reducing the fees is a good start.

If religions can advertise, why not atheism?

Richard Dawkins and some organizations defending atheism as a valid moral choice are collecting money to start a campaign in London with the slogan:

"There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life"

This slogan will be in 30 London buses during a month.

And, know what? they have collected more than sixteen times the money they needed.

Religion still has a lot influence in our societies and too many times they impose their ideas no matter the irrational they are. And what is worst, they exploit the fears of people and prey on the poor.

They say that there is not an alternative to religion, that is what organised religions want us to think. But, actually, religion should be seen as an ethic framework and ethics does not need a set of supernatural believes.

So why not to be an atheist, reject crazy ideas and still be a good person. If there is any god, he/she will be happy too.