Bring your own Shisha

You may ask why have ethical shopping. Well I see the ethical nature of companies being questioned more and more in the future and as the western consumer becomes more sophisticated in their tastes. But with increasing homogeneity across western markets, I see a key differentiator between products being how the company conducts itself in the world. Gone are the days when being discerning on where you buy things was tantamount to being a Weed smoking hippy.

I found this great site which details companies in terms of their ethical standing. Ethiscore groups companies by product and gives them a rating between 0 and 20. The higher the score, the more ethical the company. Criteria range from whether they use organic products through to their relationships with oppressive regimes and involvement in the dubious industries (Pornography). Unsurprisingly most of the companies with the highest scores tend to be the small ones with niche markets.

Also there’s Gooshing which is a shopping portal for ethical shopping.

I am of course a hypocrite to a certain degree in that I will occasionally shop at Tesco and do occasionally drink Coca Cola. But these are habits which have been drummed into me by the culture in which I live and a conscious decision has to be made everytime I decide I need to do some shopping. Habits break, but it takes time.

More info: http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/aboutec/whybuyethically.htm

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

This is the story perpetuated by organisations like the NRA and others.

We have the issue of 50 Cent and his semi autobiographical movie “Get Rich or Die tryin’” which has been much criticised by the media for promoting a guns/gangster culture. In fact, Rap & Hip Hop culture is the current bogeyman when it comes to planting the blame for the degeneration of society in the urbanised West.

However I would like us to take a step back and look at guns and why they are so ‘cool’. Guns have been part of music & the media for time immemorial.
Looking back at the early ‘talkie movies’ of the 30s, through the decades to today, guns have been associated with ‘Bad Guys’ and the ‘Bad Guys’ have always been eradicated by the ‘Good Guys’ with a gun.

So what does that mean? Guns have been represented in the media as being ‘cool’ for long before Rap & Hip Hop came on the scene. In fact, if we look at early mainstream Hip Hop, we can see that it contained honest messages about life in the ‘ghetto’, but which always had a positive slant to them. But somewhere down the line, this changed. Gangsta culture saw Hip Hop as a tool for making money as did the Record companies. Along came a more brutal form of Hip Hop called Gangsta Rap. The likes of Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre, who came out of NWA  were and still are the  prominent personalities of this genre. The Gangsta Rap movement was rapidly pushed by the record companies as youngsters were attracted to this genre of music just as a generation before them were attracted to Punk Rock and the generation before to Elvis. They were all forms of rebellion to which youths are always drawn.

So that brings us to where we are today. We have a culture which is inherently associated with violence and abuse. Which leads us into a constant furore of whether Rap & Hip Hop are to blame for this new generation of delinquents. But the important point is that no one group/genre/individual is responsible for where we are. Guns & Violence have been promoted for years, i.e. James Bond, Rambo, The Godfather Trilogy. Which we can claim are all fictional, but fiction is always rooted in reality. And the backdrops for all of these examples are reality, (James Bond - The Cold War, Rambo - vietnam, Godfather - Italian American gangs in the US).

We also have the issue of positive Rap which is not actively promoted by record companies. Why is it that 50 Cent and Snoop will always sell more than Mos Def, Talib Kweli, The Roots etc . To quote Mos Def:

“old white men is runnin this rap shit
corporate forces runnin this rap shit
some tall israeli is runnin this rap shit
we poke out our asses for a chance to cash in
cocaine, is runnin this rap shit
‘dro, ‘yac and e-pills is runnin this rap shit
mtv, is runnin this rap shit
viacom is runnin this rap shit
closet homosexuals is runnin this rap shit “

Finally I ask you to think about who is ultimately responsible for promoting this culture. To my mind the blame lies solely at the feet of 3 groups of people:

1. The media who will find ‘news’ in a ‘Gangland Killing’ as opposed to the news that ‘X has done this positive thing in the community’.

2. The Corporate world who will use this gangsta culture to cynically promote their goods because the youth are attracted to this culture, i.e. Reebok.

3. Society as a whole for looking at Gun Crime as either a minority problem, i.e. Operation Trident, Black on Black Crime. Or looking at it as something which isn’t real and we only need to worry about it if it lands on our doorstep with us being personally affected by gun crime.

We need to move away from the attitude that guns are cool and this can only happen if people realise that the killing/maiming of individuals is not ‘cool’. Having a mother cry for their dead son as a result of gun crime is not ‘cool’. Having a child orphaned because of gun crime is not ‘cool’. Carrying a gun because it makes someone feel more manly is not ‘cool’. A real man would put the gun down and be cool by simply being himself.

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. With Guns.”

Related Link: Mothers Against Guns

Just real busy with work and stuff. Have lots of fun stuff to rant about soon…just looking for some time to put it all together…

Thanks to all those guys who sent me emails asking if I’m ok. I’m all good.

Watch this space.

So I’m currently reading a book call ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ which is an interesting combination of fantasy, i.e. magicians, set during the Napoleonic wars and thus having all the traits of a Jane Austen novel. It is being adapted for the big screen by New Line Cinema.

It’s a book I would recommend reading as did a woman on the Northern Line yesterday. As most people who have travelled on the Tube/London Underground know, people rarely talk to each other. But this woman was sat not a short distance away and shouted ‘I’ve read this book, it’s good isn’t it’ across the carriage. Everyone looked up and to my surprise I found she was looking at me and smiling.

‘Yes it is good’ I replied, ‘but it’s a little slow to start with’.
‘It’s amazing how she has built up this whole bibliography which is fictional, I found myself looking for these fictional books’
‘I know, it’s great’ I smiled and went back to reading, slightly embarrassed.

She disembarked the train and as she left, she bid me Goodnight as did I.

I don’t think she was hitting on me, or I would have got the vibe and it was a very strange thing to do if she were.

But what struck me was the confidence with which she struck up the conversation. Such confidence in fact that the passenger next to me asked me if I knew her. I replied in the negative and it really got me thinking about why we don’t talk to each other anymore. Why we are scared to smile at people and we certainly don’t greet people on the street. If you have seen movies set in 18th/19th century England, it was commonplace to see people greeting each other in the street. What is wrong with the occasional Good Morning? In fact, have manners simply disappeared off the face of the planet? This Thursday just gone, 4 of us at work were walking into a shop and a woman was waiting inside as the others walked in while she waited inside, I paused before entering and gestured to her to come out, she smiled and then surprisingly she shouted back into the shop,

‘At least ONE of you is a gentleman!’

This embarrassed me no end, as I was not trying to show others up, but it may push me to think twice before holding doors open for people. It may have been considered polite on my part, but her response turned the whole situation into one which was more of embarrasment than of pleasure. Next time, I’ll just barge in wherever I like and tell everyone else to shove it.

Just came across an excellent article on Naseeb about tolerance and freedom to worship and how the current Muslim world community are certainly lacking if not ignorant of their past. We can always twist stories and make up what we want in order to show Muslims/Jews/Christians/Pagans in whatever light we like, but the point of this article is summarised in the following paragraph, which takls about the Caliph Umar, second Caliph of Islam and considered the strictest of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions:

“When we think of great early Muslims such as Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, images of a strict, overpowering fearless warrior against oppressive non-Muslims, tough on womenfolk, yet compassionate individual, come to mind. But it was this same man who put a woman, Shifa bint Abduallah as the inspector/ auditor of the market in Medina. This same man who left thousands of non-Muslims in the revenue and finance departments administering the Muslim empire, so much so that he invited a Greek from Syria entrusting him to the finance department in Medina. This same man, who when en route to see Bilal, the first caller to prayer, who had retired in Syria, stopped in the Christian town of Ayla spending the afternoon keeping good relations with the Bishop of the town.”

More Britons are dying of Liver Cirrhosis than ever before. I find it interesting that the recent proposal and subsequent implementation of longer opening hours for pubs and bars was put forward by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, as opposed to the Department of Health.

And with that news we also see Charles Kennedy – Leader of the Liberal Democrats, the 3^rd party in politics stating that he sought therapy for Alcoholism, thus starting a Leadership contest.

And most interestingly, George Galloway has entered the Big Brother house for this year’s edition of Celebrity Big Brother. George Galloway happens to be the Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, the constituents of which are approximately 50% Muslim/Bangladeshi origin. His party, Respect have a solid anti-Iraq war stance and it is widely agreed that he won his seat due to his appealing to the Muslim vote. The election in that constituency was a particularly bitter one with the incumbent Labour MP, Oona King, being branded a Jewess (She is of mixed race) in order to stir up anti-semitic feeling within that community. Bear in mind that the people of that community are amongst the poorest in the together with being the least educated, so stirring up such feelings would be very easy.

To my mind, Galloway has cheapened the name of the Party by involving himself in what is generally considered ‘Trash TV’ and it raises the question as to what benefit his constituents will get from his involvement in this game show and whether he is still drawing his MP’s salary of £50,095 per annum for the duration of his stay in the Big Brother house.

It’ll be interesting to see what Respect’s Deputy Leader, Salma Yaqoob who in my opinion has done a lot for the status of Muslims and particularly women on the national stage, says about the leader of her party effectively playing on his ‘Celebrity’ status.

As to the rest of the Big Brother contestants, I put my money (metaphorically as I don’t gamble), on Maggot because he has the coolest name.

Listening to Outlandish’s new album and one track sticks out to me. Basically, it’s an unusual departure from Outlandish’s usual rap/hip hop style, and the tune is a little ‘boy bandish’, but the lyrics change any preconceptions:

Look into my eyes
Tell me what you see
You don’t see a damn thing
’cause you can’t relate to me
You’re blinded by our differences
My life makes no sense to you
I’m the persecuted one
You’re the red, white and blue

Each day you wake in tranquility
No fears to cross your eyes
Each day I wake in gratitude
Thanking God He let me rise
You worry about your education
And the bills you have to pay
I worry about my vulnerable life
And if I’ll survive another day
Your biggest fear is getting a ticket
As you cruise your Cadillac
My fear is that the tank that has just left
Will turn around and come back

Yet, do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows
Has our world gone all blind?

Do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows?
Someone tell me…

Ooohh, let’s not cry tonight
I promise you one day it’s through
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters
Ooohh, shine a light for every soul that ain’t with us no more
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters

See I’ve known terror for quite some time
57 years so cruel
Terror breathes the air I breathe
It’s the checkpoint on my way to school
Terror is the robbery of my land
And the torture of my mother
The imprisonment of my innocent father
The bullet in my baby brother
The bulldozers and the tanks
The gases and the guns
The bombs that fall outside my door
All due to your funds
You blame me for defending myself
Against the ways of my enemies
I’m terrorized in my own land
But am I the terrorist?

Yet, do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows
Has our world gone all blind?

Do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows?
Someone tell me…

Ooohh, let’s not cry tonight, I promise you one day it’s through
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters,
Ooohh, shine a light for every soul that ain’t with us no more
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters,

America, do you realize that the taxes that you pay
Feed the forces that traumatize my every living day
So if I won’t be here tomorrow
It’s written in my fate
May the future bring a brighter day
The end of our wait

(pause)

Ooohh, let’s not cry tonight, I promise you one day it’s through
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters,
Ooohh, shine a light for every soul that ain’t with us no more
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters,

Ohh let’s not cry tonight I promise you one day is through
Ohh my brothers! Ohh my sisters!
Ooh shine a light for every Soul that ain’t with us no more
Ohh my brothers! Ohh my sisters!

 - Outlandish, “Look into my eyes”, 2005